Redistribution policies

  • How responsive is the labor market to tax policy?

    When applied to the most responsive segments of the labor market, tax policy can increase lifetime earnings and employment

    Richard Blundell, May 2014
    With aging populations and increased demands on government revenue, countries need to boost employment and earnings. Tax policy should focus on labor market entry and retirement. Those are the points where labor supply is most responsive to tax incentives, which can enhance the flow into work of people leaving school and women with young children and can prolong employment among older workers. Human capital policy has a complementary role in improving the payoff to work and ensuring that earnings hold up longer over a lifetime.
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  • Tuning unemployment insurance to the business cycle

    Unemployment insurance generosity should be greater when unemployment is high—and vice versa

    Torben M. Andersen, May 2014
    High unemployment and its social and economic consequences have lent urgency to the question of how to improve unemployment insurance in bad times without jeopardizing incentives to work or public finances in the medium term. A possible solution is a rule-based system that improves the generosity of unemployment insurance (replacement rate, benefit duration, eligibility conditions) when unemployment is high and reduces the generosity when it is low.
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  • Flat-rate tax systems and their effect on labor markets

    Despite their theoretical benefits, flat taxes have been tried only in a few formerly socialist countries

    Andreas Peichl, October 2014
    The potential economic outcomes resulting from a flat rate of income tax have been the subject of an ongoing academic and political debate. Many observers have suggested that the introduction of a flat tax would be beneficial for a country’s economy, having a positive influence on the labor market and the gross domestic product by enhancing incentives to work, save, invest, and take risks. A flat tax also significantly simplifies income taxation which increases tax compliance and reduces tax planning, avoidance, and evasion. However, despite flat taxes being on the political agenda in many countries, in practice their implementation has mostly been restricted to the transition economy countries of Eastern Europe. There is no one single flat tax system in place in these countries though; one rate does not fit all.
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