The average quality of available educational resources varies significantly across Europe. This not only affects school success and failure but also subsequent labour market outcomes. The main research question in this paper is to what extent this compositional variation among early school leavers (ESLrs) in particular can account for the crossnational variation of their income disadvantage rel...

Social scientists and philosophers have been concerned with issues surrounding the distribution of income or income inequality for over 200 years—the economist and philosopher Adam Smith discussed these issues as early as 1776. Academic writers have been writing on income inequality measurement issues for at least a century. Policy makers have also long been interested in income inequality issu...

Discussions of retirement planning and Social Security policy often focus on replacement rates, which represent retirement income or Social Security benefits relative to preretirement earnings. Replacement rates are a rule of thumb designed to simplify the process of smoothing consumption over individuals' lifetimes. Despite their widespread use, however, there is no common means of measuring r...

This paper examines several factors that impact income capitalization rates, and applies the hierarchical linear model as an analytical method. The empirical results suggest that: (1) the average income capitalization rates in different administrative areas of Taipei vary widely; (2) differences in attributes and types of residential properties have a significant impact on income capitalization...

The absolute income hypothesis—that holding other factors constant, the higher an individual’s income the better is their health—is supported by a considerable body of evidence. 2 3 However, according to the more recent relative income hypothesis, an individual’s health is also affected by the distribution of income within society. Someone with a given income would have worse health if he or sh...

The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules according to various social welfare criteria, keeping fixed the total net tax revenue. To this end, we estimate a microeconomic model with 78 parameters that capture heterogeneity in consumptionleisure preferences for singles and couples as well as in job opportunities across individuals based on deta...

Designing Optimal Taxes with a Microeconometric Model of Household Labour Supply The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules under the constraint of fixed tax revenue. To this end, we estimate a microeconomic model with 78 parameters that capture heterogeneity in consumption-leisure preferences for singles and couples as well as in job opportun...

Income and price elasticity of demand quantify the responsiveness of markets to changes in income and in prices, respectively. Under the assumptions of utility maximization and preference independence (additive preferences), mathematical relationships between income elasticity values and the uncompensated own and cross price elasticity of demand are here derived using the differential approach ...