The objective of the paper is to explore the saving and consumption responses of a representative household to a range of policy interventions such as changes in taxes and pension settings. To achieve this, it develops a two-period life-cycle model. The representative household maximises...

This note provides an elementary introduction to the measurement of welfare gains from the introduction of a new good, based on the concept of the ‘virtual price’ and standard expressions for welfare changes arising from price changes.

This paper illustrates the effects of using different distributions and summary measures, using New Zealand data for the period 2007 to 2011. Using an annual accounting period, alternative welfare metrics and units of analysis are investigated. In addition, the sensitivity to assumptions about...

Recent years have seen a series of natural disasters place significant social and fiscal strain on a number of economies. Determining the appropriate tax response to a natural disaster involves multiple complex decisions that often need to be made under time pressure with limited information....

This note considers the problem of distributing a fixed amount of money (‘income’) among a given number of people, such that inequality (measured by either the Gini or Atkinson measure) takes a specified value. It is well known that simultaneous equations admit of many solutions where the...

This paper offers a quantitative analysis of housing supply and demand in Spain. To this end, it formulates a model in line with the traditional models of the literature. Using Spanish data for the period 1975 to 2009, reduced form and structural models are estimated. The results obtained show...

This paper examines estimation of the elasticity of taxable income using instrumental variable regression methods. It is argued that the ‘standard instrument’ for the net-of-tax rate − the rate that would be applicable post-reform but with unchanged income levels − is unsatisfactory in...

The literature testing for aggregate impacts of taxes on long-run growth rates in the OECD has generally used tax rate measures constructed from macroeconomic aggregates such as tax revenues. These have a number of advantages but two major disadvantages: they are typically average, rather than...

This paper shows the utility of the elasticity of reported income to assess tax reforms in detail from the perspectives of tax revenue and well-being. We provide evidence of the value of the elasticity of reported income in Spain given the variations in marginal rates of the Personal Income Tax....

This paper analyses the latest (2005) data available from the World Bank’s InternationalComparison Program (ICP). It assesses the extent to which the prices of goods and services in New Zealand (NZ) differ from those observed in other OECD countries, and Australia in particular. The main...