A major difficulty faced by researchers who want to study the consumption and savings behavior of households is the lack of reliable panel data on household expenditures. One possibility is to use surveys that follow the same households over time, but such data are rare and they typically have...

This paper provides an overview of the work of the Expert Group on the Joint Distribution of Income, Consumption and Wealth at Micro Level (EG ICW) set up by Eurostat and the OECD. It discusses the challenges of producing joint income, consumption and wealth estimates, assesses their quality,...

This paper investigates whether heterogeneity in price search mitigates consumption inequality. I propose a model where the consumer can pay weakly lower prices by shopping more frequently. The extent by which shopping intensity decreases prices paid depends on the consumer shopping technology....

We compare the distributional effects of policy changes introduced in the period 2008-2013 in twelve EU countries using the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD. The countries, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and the UK, chose different...

The at-risk-of-poverty rate is one of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Timeliness of this indicator is critical for monitoring the effectiveness of policies. However, due in part to the complicated nature of...

We provide an overview of microsimulation approaches to assess the effects of policy on the income distribution. We focus mainly on the role of tax-benefit policies and review the concept of microsimulation and how it contributes to the analysis of the income distribution in general and policy...

EUROMOD is a 15-country tax-benefit microsimulation model based on national household micro-data. It is designed to estimate the revenue and distributional effects of national or EUwide changes in social and fiscal policy. In order to provide European results, and for results at the national...

Although people's perception of (income or wealth) inequality has important e_ects on their decisions as economic agents or voters, little is known about how perceptions relate to measured inequality. We present a novel formal framework that is based on the assumption that people typically do...

This paper studies the redistributive and revenue effects of bracket creep in Germany under various inflation scenarios and evaluates the feasibility to charge a rich tax to fight bracket creep for the income distribution in 2009. Using a tax micro-simulation model developed for the newly...

The flat income tax has become increasingly popular recently, yet its implementation is limited to Eastern Europe. We analyse the distributional and efficiency effects of flat tax scenarios for Western European countries. Our simulations show that flat tax rates required to attain revenue...