We develop and estimate a microeconometric model of household labour supply in four European countries representative of different economies and welfare policy regimes: Denmark, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom. We then simulate, under the constraint of constant total net tax revenue...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the wage gap between temporary and permanent jobs in 12 European countries. We use the semi-parametric (quantile regression) approach and evaluate the wage gap across the entire wage distribution. We show that the fixed-term wage gap decreases as higher...

In recent years many countries of the European Union (EU) have implemented comprehensive smoking bans to reduce exposure to tobacco smoke in public places and all indoor workplaces. Despite the intense public debate, research on the impact of smoking regulation on health, particularly within the...

In this note we study (adverse) selection in a labour supply model where potential applicants are characterised by different vocational premiums and skills. We show how the composition of the pool of active workers changes as wage increases. Contrary to standard results, average productivity...

In order to estimate labour supply responses among older people we have employed a very simple model of retirement decisions that can be estimated on a single cross-section sample, and still be given a structural interpretation in terms of inter-temporal decisions. The model is estimated on...

We address the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets in terms of poverty. In order to accomplish this task, we identify a suitable notion of ‘multidimensional poverty line’ and we characterize axiomatically several poverty rankings of opportunity profiles. Among them, the...

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. From a policy point of view, however, it is important to distinguish between causation and selection. Previous research trying to control for unobserved heterogeneity has found conflicting results: in most cases, a strong...

This paper investigates the relationship between saving and health spending in a two-period overlapping generations economy. Individuals work in the first period of life and live in retirement in old age. Health spending is an activity that increases the quality of life and longevity. Empirical...

We examine the second-best family policy under the assumption that both the number, and the future earning capacities of the children born to a couple are random variables with probability distributions conditional on unobservable parental actions. Potential parents take their decisions without...

We analyse a model of income tax avoidance with heterogenous agents; we assume the presence of a comparison income e¤ect and of a psychic cost (disutility) of tax dodging. In this context, we show two sets of results. First, we study the policy preferences of the agents, and identify a...