We provide a critique of the standard methodology which bases welfare comparisons between households on deflating household income and consumption by an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle in-come...

We provide a critique of the standard methodology which bases welfare comparisons between households on deflating household income and consumption by an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle income...

This paper is to determine the optimality of taxation based on a comparative analysis of income taxation in developed and developing countries. In our opinion, the main idea of income tax should be the optimal distribution of tax literacy on the basis of a direct definition of income of...

Energy markets and energy-intensive industries in all EU member states - especially in Germany - are subject to a diverse set of policies related to climate change. We analyse the potential efficiency losses from simultaneous application of emission taxes and emissions trading in qualitative and...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an 'optimal' tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

After the failure of the United Nations climate change conference at Copenhagen the EU is under domestic pressure to justify ambitious unilateral emissions reduction targets. Cost efficiency of EU-wide emission abatement becomes increasingly important in order to sustain EU leadership in climate...

In this paper we study the impact of tax-benefit systems on income inequality and work incentives across the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU). Using EUROMOD, the EU-wide taxbenefit microsimulation model, we disentangle the role of taxes, benefits and social insurance contributions in...

This paper compares the treatment of the family in the eleven Euro Countries and U.K. tax systems. For the sake of simplicity families with only one earner are considered. In the first section we survey the main features of the current systems in the twelve Countries to take account of marriage...

We provide the first estimate of the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption, μ, for Europe and for thirty individual European countries, using the income-tax individual-level data. Specifically, we rely on the absolute equal-sacrifice approach and CRRA utility function to elicit the...

The U.S. residential housing market collapse illustrates the consequences of ignoring risk while funding mortgage borrowing. Collateral over-valuation was a foundational piece of the crisis. Over the past few decades, secondary markets, securitization, policy and psychology increased the flow of...