I analyze whether wage policies - like minimum wages and wage subsidies - can add value to an optimal non-linear earnings tax scheme in a perfectly competitive labour market. Jobs in the labour market differ along two margins: intensity (labour effort) and duration (labour hours). Three key...

I analyze whether wage policies -- like minimum wages and wage subsidies -- can add value to an optimal non-linear earnings tax scheme in a perfectly competitive labour market. Jobs in the labour market differ along two margins: intensity (labour effort) and duration (labour hours). Three key...

Gender based taxation (GBT) has been recently proposed as a promising policy in order to improve women's status in the labour market and within the family. We use a microeconometric model of household labour supply in order to evaluate, with Italian data, the behavioural and welfare effects of...

In all continental European countries there exist non-market mechanisms that determine or "regulate" wage rates for the low-paid. We consider the experience of three countries that have national minimum wages - France, Belgium, and the Netherlands - and three where low wage rates are determined...

This Article argues that employment subsidies could help ameliorate the situation of low-income workers but that they concede too much to the work-centered agenda that motivated the 1996 welfare legislation that enacted TANF. The case for employment subsidies, the Article argues, rests on...

This paper analyzes the effect of changes in structural progressivity of national income tax systems on observed and actual income inequality. Using several unique measures of progressivity over the 1981-2005 period for a large panel of countries, we find that progressivity reduces inequality in...

This paper examines whether income inequality is affected by the structural progressivity of national income tax systems. Using detailed personal income tax schedules for a large panel of countries, we develop and estimate comprehensive, time-varying measures of structural progressivity of...

This paper examines how human capital based approaches explain the distribution of earnings. It assesses traditional, quasi-experimental, and new micro-based structural models, the latter of which gets at population heterogeneity by estimating individual-specific earnings function parameters....

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information.