Natural experiments provide explicit and robust identifying assumptions for the estimation of treatment effects. Yet their use for policy design is often limited by the difficulty in extrapolating on the basis of reduced-form estimates of policy effects. On the contrary, structural models allow...

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...

If participation in the labor market helps to secure women’s outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time...

Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is increasingly used as a way to measure individual wellbeing. Interpreted as "experienced utility", it has been compared to "decision utility" using specific experiments (Kahneman et al., 1997) or stated preferences(Benjamin et al. 2012). We suggest here an original...

Subjective wellâ€being (SWB) is increasingly used as a way to measure individual wellâ€being. Interpreted as “experienced utilityâ€, it has been compared to “decision utility†using specific experiments (Kahneman et al., 1997) or stated preferences (Benjamin et al....

Discrete-choice models provide a tractable method and a simple way to represent utility-maximizing labor supply decisions in the presence of highly nonlinear and possibly non-convex budget constraints. Thus, it is not surprising that they are so extensively used for ex-ante evaluation of...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of a tax policy change on social welfare by using jointly a collective model of household labor supply and a microsimulation program of the French tax-benefit system. The collective approach allows studying the intrahousehold distribution so that for the...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the within-household distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

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...