By inverting Saez (2002)’s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite profound changes in market incomes and important …scal reforms over the period. Results are robust to numer...

A widespread method for nowand forecasting economic macro level parameters such as GDP growth rates are survey-based indicators which contain early information in contrast to official data. But surveys are commonly affected by nonresponding units which can produce biases if these missing values can not be regarded as missing at random. As many papers examined the effect of nonresponse in indivi...

This paper describes the implementation of a factorial survey within the SOEP-Pretest of 2008 and investigates (1) respondents’ comments about the vignettes, (2) interviewers’ assessments of respondents comprehension and willingness to answer, and (3) response behavior regarding response time, use of the answering scale, and consistency of evaluations by different age groups and educational bac...

Do indexes of house prices behave differently depending on the estimation method? If so, to what extent? To address these questions, we use a unique dataset that we compiled from individual listings in a widely circulated real estate advertisement magazine. The dataset contains more than 470,000 listings of housing prices between 1986 and 2008, including the period of the housing bubble and its...

In health care systems today, including those of Switzerland and the United States, participants do not necessarily see the big picture of lifetime health costs and quality of life, and in many systems consumers and providers lack the incentives to manage preventative and chronic care to minimize lifetime private and social health costs. Resource allocation problems induced by asymmetric inform...

Counterfactual decompositions allow the researcher to analyze the changes in wage distributions by discriminating between the effect of changes in the population characteristics and the effect of changes in returns to these characteristics. In this paper we derive counterfactual distributions by recovering the conditional distribution via a set of quantile regressions, and correcting for the en...

Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries. Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of more timely data entry and greater accuracy in guiding respondents through skip patterns. Further benefi...

The importance of lateral pipe flow on runoff generation in wet steep hillslopes has been described in many case studies from around the world. However, most hillslope studies are done in isolation and usually focus on the idiosyncrasies of individual hillslope characteristics and pipe flow response at a single site. Consequently, the first order controls on pipe flow responses remain poorly un...

The 1994 discovery of arsenic in ground water in Bangladesh prompted a massive public health effort to test all tubewells in the country and convince nearly one-quarter of the population to switch to arsenic-free drinking water sources. According to numerous sources, the campaign was effective in leading the majority of households at risk of arsenic poisoning to abandon backyard wells in favor ...