Papers by Gerlinde Verbist
Economics Series, 2006
Lazarsfeld and the economist Oskar Morgenstern -with the financial support from the Ford Foundati... more Lazarsfeld and the economist Oskar Morgenstern -with the financial support from the Ford Foundation, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and the City of Vienna, the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) is the first institution for postgraduate education and research in economics and the social sciences in Austria. The Economics Series presents research done at the Department of Economics and Finance and aims to share "work in progress" in a timely way before formal publication. As usual, authors bear full responsibility for the content of their contributions. Das Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS) wurde im Jahr 1963 von zwei prominenten Exilösterreicherndem Soziologen Paul F. Lazarsfeld und dem Ökonomen Oskar Morgenstern -mit Hilfe der Ford-Stiftung, des Österreichischen Bundesministeriums für Unterricht und der Stadt Wien gegründet und ist somit die erste nachuniversitäre Lehr-und Forschungsstätte für die Sozial-und Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Österreich. Die Reihe Ökonomie bietet Einblick in die Forschungsarbeit der Abteilung für Ökonomie und Finanzwirtschaft und verfolgt das Ziel, abteilungsinterne Diskussionsbeiträge einer breiteren fachinternen Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen. Die inhaltliche Verantwortung für die veröffentlichten Beiträge liegt bei den Autoren und Autorinnen.
The Design of In-work Benefits
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 20, 2018
This chapter focuses on the impact of the design of in-work benefits on work incentives and pover... more This chapter focuses on the impact of the design of in-work benefits on work incentives and poverty reduction. Focusing on one country, Belgium, microsimulation techniques are used to study stylized design changes in a stepwise manner, examining in each step which characteristics of an in-work benefit “make it work.” As this study makes clear, both the size and design matter. Sufficient budget is needed to reach significant changes in outcomes, while the exact specifications of the way in which the benefit is designed are crucial. The results show some trade-offs between employment and poverty objectives, as well as between labor-supply outcomes at the extensive and the intensive margin. For the Belgian context, an individual-based system that uses hourly wages as a threshold seems to reconcile both work incentives and poverty outcomes in a satisfactory way.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Jul 1, 2012
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Dec 19, 2016
We explore the prospects for using the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS)... more We explore the prospects for using the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) dataset as an underlying micro-database for the EU tax-benefit model, EUROMOD. This will allow expanding the policy domains currently covered in EUROMOD with dimensions like wealth taxation, incentives for wealth accumulation and asset tests determining benefit eligibility. As the HFCS only contains gross income amounts which are not suitable for distributive analysis, the purpose of this paper is to derive net incomes by simulating the gross-to-net transition with EUROMOD taking into account all important details of the social security and personal income tax system. In order to identify the issues and illustrate their importance a trial database for Belgium and Italy is constructed.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2020
Many researchers and policymakers have made strong arguments for broadening the taxes on wealth a... more Many researchers and policymakers have made strong arguments for broadening the taxes on wealth and its returns. Although the theoretical literature on (optimal) wealth taxation is growing, there exists a large void in empirical research. This paper addresses this void by analysing the redistributive and budgetary impact of wealth taxes in six European countries using the perspective of the joint distribution of income and wealth. We use data from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) and EUROMOD. We show that existing wealth taxes do not achieve any significant redistribution. Although they are in most cases strongly progressive, the low redistributive effect is mainly due to their small size. Moreover, there is a lack of neutrality in the tax system with regard to the source from which households draw their financial living standard: income or wealth. Hence, existing wealth taxes score badly on both vertical and horizontal equity grounds.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2019
Belgium has seen major changes in its tax-benefit system over the 28 year period 1992-2020. These... more Belgium has seen major changes in its tax-benefit system over the 28 year period 1992-2020. These changes have, to a large extent, co-determined the evolution of disposable incomes of Belgian households on the one hand, and work incentives on the other. In this paper we assess changes in tax-benefit policies over the full course of 1992-2020 along three dimensions: equity, efficiency and budgetary impact. We construct counterfactual distributions of disposable incomes under alternative tax benefit systems by means of the arithmetic microsimulation model EUROMOD. We summarize distributional effects of changes in the tax benefit system by measuring the impact on inequality of pre-tax and transfer income, and the impact on work incentives by aggregating the marginal tax rates at the intensive and extensive margin into the marginal cost of public funds. We find that most changes in the tax-benefit system have been pro-poor and that the redistributive power has -depending on the chosen benchmark-either been increased, or remained stable. Two reductions of personal income taxes eroded the redistributive power of the tax benefit system. Work incentives deteriorated under the tax hikes of the fiscal consolidation period in the nineties. The improvement of work incentives was considerable thanks to the introduction of an earned income tax credit, and the lowering of personal income taxes and social security contributions, but came at a large budgetary cost. Finally, the size of some of the effects crucially depends on the choice of the 'no policy change' counterfactual: either indexation with inflation or indexation with nominal wage growth.
Mee met de stroom? Regionale verschillen in tewerkstellingskansen van migranten
Inkomens- en arbeidsmarktpositie van migranten in België
Mei 2010 * Dit bericht kadert binnen het onderzoeksproject 'Open grenzen voor een leefbare welvaa... more Mei 2010 * Dit bericht kadert binnen het onderzoeksproject 'Open grenzen voor een leefbare welvaartsstaat?', gefinancierd door het Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds van de Universiteit Antwerpen.
Tijdschrift voor Sociologie, Feb 20, 2005
De submodule van België in EUROMOD werkt met de gegevens van de PSBH. Vandaar dat de resultaten e... more De submodule van België in EUROMOD werkt met de gegevens van de PSBH. Vandaar dat de resultaten enigszins verschillen van die van tabel 2. Bron: .
Overheidstegemoetkomingen voor studenten hoger onderwijs: een doorlichting
Het profijt van de belastinghervorming
The design of in-work benefits: how to boost employment and combat poverty in Belgium
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Apr 1, 2016
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Mar 1, 2016
An aspect that has only recently received attention in the study of policy measures aimed at supp... more An aspect that has only recently received attention in the study of policy measures aimed at supporting families with young children in their work-family life balance is its distributive impact. Are these measures used by poor and rich families alike, or is there a 'Matthew effect' at play, in the sense that poor families are underrepresented in using such measures? In order to perform such an evaluation one needs to have a measure of both cash and in-kind benefits related to policies that help families cope with the care of young children and job expectations. In-kind benefits are offered mainly in the form of subsidized early childhood education and care (ECEC), for which an appropriate cash equivalent has to be derived. As the value of in-kind benefits from publicly provided services is not included in the EU-SILC data, we derive them for this paper in line with earlier studies (e.g.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Mar 1, 2007
The role of indirect taxes in social policy is investigated by 1) comparing the distributional pa... more The role of indirect taxes in social policy is investigated by 1) comparing the distributional pattern of indirect taxes with the one of personal income taxes and social security contributions; 2) calculating the indirect tax liabilities for recipients of social benefits; 3) assessing the distributional impact of shifting the financing of social security from contributions to indirect taxes. For this purpose we combine the data of the Household Budget Survey and the SocioEconomic Panel, as well as two microsimulation models, namely ASTER (for the calculation of indirect taxes) and MISIM (for the calculation of personal income taxes and social contributions).
OECD social employment and migration working papers, Jan 22, 2021
This document, as well as any data and map included herein, are without prejudice to the status o... more This document, as well as any data and map included herein, are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area.
Housing Studies, May 6, 2019
In this paper, we focus on the tax deductibility of mortgage loans, which is a key measure of hou... more In this paper, we focus on the tax deductibility of mortgage loans, which is a key measure of housing policies in many countries. Several studies have shown that the distribution of the benefits of this measure runs counter to the vertical equity principle. We contribute to the existing literature by addressing the distribution of the tax deductibility of mortgage loans considering the spatial outcomes of this policy. We use Belgian data to measure the impact of this policy on households' income and inequality and poverty in different types of areas. We show that this measure favours suburban households and subsidizes urban sprawl. Exogenous factors such as past housing policies and homeownership determinants play a key role in this phenomenon. We also simulate the distributional impact of three stylized reforms of the deductibility of mortgage loans in Belgium. These simulations show that the distributional outcomes could be improved on both social and spatial sides.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2013
This paper analyses how maternal labor supply responds to the price and availability of childcare... more This paper analyses how maternal labor supply responds to the price and availability of childcare services. It focuses in particular on the childcare market of Flanders, which is characterised by above average childcare use, a wide variety of price schemes and suppliers, and strong government supervision regarding quality. Variation in prices and the degree of rationing of three types of childcare services at the municipal level are used to identify mothers' labor supply responses. A discrete labor supply model of the Van Soest (1995) type is elaborated to allow for heterogeneity in prices and to distinguish between rationed and non-rationed households.These extensions rest on rationing probabilities that are estimated separately for informal childcare, formal subsidised childcare and formal non-subsidised childcare using partial observability models (Poirier,1980). The estimates confirm earlier findings for Germany and Italy, indicating only small price effects and relatively large supply effects. This shows that labor supply incentives of expansion of childcare services are also present in a country which has surpassed the EU target of childcare slots for 33% of children below the age of 3 (Belgium, in contrast with Germany and Italy). Moreover, budgetary simulations suggest the expansion to be beneficial to the exchequer. Rising tax and social security benefits following the increase in labor supply largely exceed the costs of expansion.
Concepts and Methods for Microsimulation Modeling in the Social Sciences
New Horizons in Modeling and Simulation for Social Epidemiology and Public Health, 2021
Sociaal-economische levensomstandigheden van eenoudergezinnen in België
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Papers by Gerlinde Verbist