The impact of free, universal pre-school education on maternal labour supply

We estimate the impact of free, universal pre-school education for three year olds on maternal labour supply in England, exploiting discontinuities arising from date of birth eligibility cut-offs and geographical variation in the speed at which the entitlement effectively covered all children. The impacts using geographical variation in the roll-out imply that the expansion […]

The impact of students’ part-time work on educational outcomes

This paper addresses the issue of school students’ part-time employment in the last year of compulsory education, and its impact on educational outcomes. Estimating the causal effect is not straightforward. Firstly, those who obtain part-time employment could have certain unobservable characteristics, which also have an impact on their educational outcomes. Secondly, the decisions to […]

The design of in-work benefits: how to boost employment and combat poverty in Belgium

[…] countries. Most papers in this domain have investigated existing in-work benefits (for an overview see e.g. Kenworthy, 2015). We take a different approach as we evaluate the impact of different design components on work incentives and poverty indicators by building step-by-step a stylised working tax credit. By different design components we mean: is the […]

Wage progression and the gender wage gap: the causal impact of hours of work

[…] may be different from each other in all sorts of other ways that are difficult to control for, meaning that researchers risk bundling up the actual causal impact of experience with the impacts of other factors that also affect wages or wage progression. In the new working paper, we employ a technique to get […]

Policy recommendations on the gender effects of changes in tax bases, rates, and units: results of microsimulation analyses for six selected EU member states

The design of tax systems has a considerable impact on the personal distribution of income and wealth at the household and the individual level, and due to the gender-differentiated socio-economic conditions also in a gender perspective. One of the most important areas of taxation is the taxation of personal incomes through the personal income […]

The fiscal and equity impact of social tax expenditures in the EU

[…] find a variety of effects, in terms of sign and magnitude, across Member States, and within these, among types of households. Overall our findings suggest that the impact of tax expenditure on tax revenues and on income inequalities can be sizeable. The redistributive impact of removing tax expenditures can go both directions, either on […]

The income and consumption effects of Covid-19 and the role of public policy

[…] We analyse the source of these inequalities by relating employment outcomes to factors related occupational and industrial characteristics. We then conduct a quantitative assessment of the likely impact of covid-19 on households’ consumption and find that, because the adverse labour market impacts are concentrated on workers with low income and low assets, 70 percent […]