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Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Social welfare effects of tax-benefit reform under endogenous participation and unemployment: an ordinal approach

Contributors

Van Baalen, Brigitte; Mueller, Tobias

Published in

International tax and public finance, vol. 21, no. 2, p. 198-227

Publication date

2014

First online date

2013-01-11

Abstract

This paper analyzes the social welfare effects of tax-benefit reforms in a framework integrating endogenous labor supply and unemployment. We adopt an or- dinal approach to social welfare comparisons by searching for “socially desirable” reforms that would improve social welfare for an entire class of social welfare func- tions. In the model, there is a discrete distribution of individuals’ productivities and individuals are heterogeneous with respect to leisure preferences (or disability of work). Labor supply decisions are limited to the participation decision. Unemploy- ment is modeled in a search and matching framework with individual wage bargain- ing. For the social welfare analysis, the model is calibrated for Switzerland. Starting from a situation with an unemployment benefit scheme, the introduction of in-work benefits is shown to be a “socially desirable” reform: it would be unanimously pre- ferred to the current situation according to all social welfare functions based on the criteria of Pareto, anonymity, and the principle of transfers. This result holds for two different types of preference heterogeneity (leisure preferences or disability of work) and also for the case where job search effort cannot be monitored

Keywords

  • Tax-benefit reform · Unemployment · Search-matching models · Social
  • Welfare · Preference heterogeneity

UNIGE affiliation entities

Citation (ISO format)

VAN BAALEN, Brigitte, MUELLER, Tobias. Social welfare effects of tax-benefit reform under endogenous participation and unemployment: an ordinal approach. In: International tax and public finance, 2014, vol. 21, n° 2, p. 198–227. doi: 10.1007/s10797-012-9263-7

Main files (2)

Article (Published version)
Article (Accepted version)

Identifiers

Additional URL for this publication

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10797-012-9263-7

Journal ISSN

0927-5940
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Technical informations

Creation

04/04/2014 08:44:00

First validation

04/04/2014 08:44:00

Update

11/08/2026 12:16:19

Status update

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