Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/20744 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 1445
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Earning an income is probably the best way of avoiding poverty and social exclusion, hence the recent trend of promoting employment through in-work transfers in OECD countries. Yet, the relative consensus on the need for ?making work pay? policies is muddied by a number of concerns relative to the design of the reforms and the treatment of the family dimension. Relying on EUROMOD, a EU-15 integrated tax-benefit microsimulation software, we simulate two types of in-work benefits. The first one is means-tested on family income, in the fashion of the British Working Family Tax Credit, while the second is a purely individualized policy. Both reforms are built on the same cost basis (after behavioral responses) and simulated in three European countries which experience severe poverty traps, namely Finland, France and Germany. The potential labor supply responses to the reforms and the subsequent redistributive impacts are assessed for each country using a structural discrete-choice model. We compare how both reforms achieve poverty reduction and social inclusion (measured as the number of transitions into activity). All three countries present different initial conditions, including institutional environment, existing tax-benefit systems and distribution of incomes and wages. These sources of heterogeneity are exploited together with different labor supply sensitivities to explain the cross-country differences in the impact of the reforms.
Subjects: 
tax-benefit systems
in-work benefits
microsimulation
household labor supply
multinomial logit
JEL: 
H31
C52
J22
C25
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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