This paper provides an account of a South African tax-benefit microsimulation model - SAMOD - which has been developed for use by government over the past ten years. The two datasets that underpin the current version of SAMOD are introduced, and the model's tax and benefit policies are described...

This text describes in detail how to simulate the poverty impacts of changes in the entitlement rules and benefit values of the Bolsa Família Program. This simulation is especially challenging due to: i) the absence of a specific question on Bolsa Família income in the PNAD household survey...

This article summarizes a micro-simulation exercise for the Mexican human development program Oportunidades and presents a series of simulations of its actual and potential impact upon poverty at the national, urban and rural levels. The micro-simulation tool used for this paper makes accounting...

This paper provides an account of a Nambian tax-benefit microsimulation model - NAMOD - which has been developed for use by government. Following a section on the importance of social security in Namibia and recent related studies, the paper outlines the tax-benefit policies that are included...

After three decades of persistently high income inequality, from 2001 Brazil experienced a downward inequality trend followed by rising household income growth. Both movements lasted until 2015. This work synthesizes the results of six papers, describing Brazilian income distribution trends and...

In this article I discuss the potential role of agent-based modeling techniques in development economics. Development economics has recently seen a strong rise of experimental evidence from the field and the laboratory. At the same time, there is a debate on how theory should adapt to this new...

Are children harmed when states act to prohibit discrimination against same-sex couples who wish to foster or adopt? This question stands at the heart of a heated debate between religious child welfare agencies that challenge such antidiscrimination laws on constitutional grounds and cities and...

We simulate the short- and long-term distributional consequences of COVID-19 in the four largest Latin American economies: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. We show that the short-term impact on income inequality and poverty can be very significant, but that additional spending on social...

This paper analyses the impact of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) extensions on jobseeker households in selected US states and examines how these extensions compare to the pre-pandemic policies. The analysis finds that PUA extensions increase benefit duration for all jobseekers, but due...

The global food price shock of 2006-2008 has particularly affected poorer strata of populations in several developing countries. In Egypt and some other countries it has put food subsidy schemes to the test. This paper develops two comparable computable general equilibrium models for Egypt and...