The extent to which siblings resemble each other measures the total impact of family background in shaping life outcomes. We study sibling similarity in cognitive skills, school grades, and educational attainment in Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compare sibling similarity by parental education and occupation within […]

[…] specific housing policy instruments, housing allowance and mortgage interest tax relief, also exploring recent changes there and the motives behind these. The last part estimates the distributional impact of housing allowances and mortgage tax relief in 2016 as compared with 2007 using the European tax-benefit model EUROMOD. The paper concludes with a discussion of […]

[…] coverage and adequacy, is of the essence. We assess the budgetary, distributional and poverty effects of the current Spanish regional minimum income schemes, as well as the impact of increasing both coverage rates and adequacy levels. Using the European microsimulation model EUROMOD together with microdata from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living […]

Policy makers are generally interested in both the anti-poverty impact and the efficiency of reforms. To connect these two dimensions, I measure the poverty gap change per unit of net revenue that tax-benefit reforms produce. To isolate the impact of reforms and account for labour supply responses, I apply a microsimulation decomposition framework to […]

[…] known from the previous literature, have a regressive effect on the tax-benefit system. On the contrary, in-kind benefit seem to have a progressive effect. To analyse the impact of both, we extend our income concept by both, indirect taxes and in-kind benefits. If we look on the distributional impact, we find that the inequality-enhancing […]

[…] available in the surveys. The methodology uses harmonized and publicly available data sources (SILC, HFCS) and provides highly comparable results. We discuss the methodological steps and their impact on the income distribution. In particular, we highlight the effects of imputations and the adjustment of the variables to national accounts totals. Furthermore, we compare different […]

[…] the COVID-19 crisis on the economy has been huge. National income fell by 20% in April, to a level last seen in the early 2000s. But the impact of this vast aggregate shock on the finances of different households will vary widely. In this report, we use a novel source of real-time data on […]