The current debt crisis has given rise to a debate about deeper fiscal integration in Europe. The view is widespread that moving towards a ‘fiscal union’ would have a stabilising effect in the event of macroeconomic shocks. In this paper we study the economic effects of introducing...

The Great Recession and the resulting European debt crisis revived a debate about deeper fiscal integration in the Eurozone. We discuss different alternatives how an unemployment insurance system for the euro area could be designed and run counterfactual simulations based on micro data to...

We follow the inverted optimal tax approach to characterize and compare "tax-benefit revealed" social preferences in 17 EU countries and the US. Following Bargain et al. (2013), we invert the optimal income taxation model on the distributions of net and gross incomes and use labor supply...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method that allows us to disentangle the direct policy effect from the effect of changing market incomes. Over the whole period 1979-2007 the cumulative tax policy effect aggravated income inequality...

We analyze to which extent social inequality aversion differs across nations when control ling for actual country differences in labor supply responses. Towards this aim, we estimate labor supply elasticities at both extensive and intensive margins for 17 EU countries and the US. Using the same...

We analyze different alternatives how a common unemployment insurance system for the euro area (EA) could be designed and assess their effectiveness to act as an insurance device in the presence of asymmetric macroeconomic shocks. Running counterfactual simulations based on micro data for the...