Journal articles
"The Redistributive Impact of Indirect Taxation in the EU: lessons from the post-financial crisis" (with Mattia Ricci) - Economic Analysis and Policy, 2024
Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592623003314?via%3Dihub
During the pre-COVID decade, indirect taxes have risen in the vast majority of the EU Member States. While regressive effect of indirect taxes is well documented, less it is known about differences among EU countries and how they developed over time. Similarly, while policy makers have often suggested that opportunities exist in the tax-benefit system for compensating low-income households, not much it is known about how successful different countries have been on this front. In this paper, we analyse the redistributive effects of the indirect tax changes taking place in the pre-COVID decade. We explore their impact along with the other changes that took place in the broader tax-benefit system...
"Characterizing the schooling cycle" (with Barbara Sadaba and Sunčica Vujić)- Economic Modelling, 2024
This paper examines the cyclical dynamics of school participation decision, using data for 16-24-year-olds attending full-time post-compulsory education in the UK in the period from 1995Q1 to 2019Q4. We find evidence of a highly persistent education cycle, largely explained by the business cycle.
Link: Characterizing the schooling cycle - ScienceDirect
"Taxing households energy consumption in the EU: the tax burden and its redistributive effect" (with Antonio F. Amores and Mattia Ricci ) - Energy Policy, 2023
The taxation of energy consumption is a central topic in the current policy debate of the European Union. While raising energy taxation is part of the European Commission's strategy for achieving its 2030/50 climate targets, the ongoing dramatic increases in the price of energy products are raising calls for reducing their taxation. Therefore, a close consideration of the incidence and redistributive effects of energy taxation is crucial to design compensatory measures and to ensure support for the Green transition. In this paper, we employ the EUROMOD microsimulation model to estimate the burden and the redistributive impact of energy consumption taxation on households across Member States....
Working papers
Inflation, fiscal policy and inequality: The distributional impact of fiscal measures to compensate for consumer inflation , ECB Occasional Paper Series N330 (with Antonio F. Amores, Henrique S. Basso, Simeon Bischl, Paola De Agostini, Silvia De Poli, Emanuele Dicarlo, Maria Flevotomou, Maximilian Freier, Esteban García-Miralles, Myroslav Pidkuyko, Mattia Ricci, Sara Riscado)
Link: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op330~2e42ffb621.en.pdf
This paper analyses the distributional impact of high consumer inflation in the euro area and government measures to compensate households in 2022. The study uses the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union (EUROMOD) with microdata as the input – EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC) and household budget surveys (HBS) – to quantify the distributional impact of inflation, income support measures and measures aimed at containing prices. The analysis confirms that purchasing power and welfare were more severely affected by the 2022 inflation surge in lower-income households than in higher-income households ...
Limiting Prices or Transferring Money? An ex ante assessment of alternative measures to cope with the hike in energy prices, JRC Working Papers on Taxation and Structural Reforms, European Commission, 2023, JRC134801. (with Antonio F. Amores, Paola De Agostini, Silvia De Poli and Michael Christl) - Submitted
Link: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC134801
The hike in energy prices across Europe in 2022 and 2023 led to significant government interventions. Several governments introduced ‘energy price cap’ measures to alleviate the increased burden on households’ expenditures. This paper presents an ex ante assessment of the expected distributional impact of the inflation surge and the cushioning effect of these price cap policies introduced in 2023 in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. Our analysis combines macroforecasting techniques with microsimulation methods and shows that the inflationary shock of 2023 will more severely affect those households at the bottom of the income distribution. Our results also highlight that the price cap measures will only partly absorb the negative distributional consequences of the inflationary shock...
"Enforcing `Equal Pay for Equal Work' in the EU: what would it take? " JRC Working Papers on Taxation and Structural Reforms, European Commission, 2022 (with Silvia De Poli) - Submitted (R&R)
The European Parliament has recently approved new binding pay transparency measures to promote ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’, a European Union (EU) founding principle at the heart of the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan for 2030. Using harmonised microdata from the 27 EU countries (EU 27) and a novel estimation approach based on blocking with regression adjustments, we provide new comparable estimates of the gap in gross hourly wages between women and men performing similar work. This gap ranges from about 6% in Germany to 18% in Estonia. We also shed new light on the (heterogeneous) distributional consequences of a hypothetical enforcement of equal pay for equal work, simulating an upward shift in women’s gross hourly wage....
Characterizing the schooling cycle Link: https://docs.iza.org/dp15237.pdf - IZA DP No. 15237
Work in progress
The future of minimum energy taxes in the EU: Environmental and distributional impacts (with Toon Vandyck, Mattia Ricci, Luis Rey, Marie Tamba, Fabian Wagner)
Who is energy poor in the EU? (with Antonio F. Amores and Ilda Dreoni)
Challenging the green and fair trade-offs of consumption taxation in the EU27 (with Antonio F. Amores and Silvia De Poli)
Other reports and articles
"EUROMOD baseline report", JRC Working Papers on Taxation and Structural Reforms No 1/2022 (with many colleagues)
This paper presents baseline results from the latest public version (I4.0+) of EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. We begin by briefly discussing the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and at-risk-of-poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the main reasons for the differences between these and their correspondent from the EU Statistics on Incomes and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We further compare EUROMOD distributional indicators across all EU 27 countries and over time between 2018 and 2021. Finally, we provide estimates of marginal effective tax rates (METR), an indicator which captures the effect of tax-benefit systems on work incentives at the intensive margin. Throughout the paper, we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results
Link: https://euromod-web.jrc.ec.europa.eu/resources/other-reports
"Shedding light on hidden deprivations. Time-income poverty and public policies in Latin America. Lessons from the LIMTIP experiences" UNDP background paper for the 2016 Human Development Report for Latin America (available in English and Spanish). HDR 2016. Link to the background paper: English version | Spanish version
“La pertinencia y desafíos de incorporar el tiempo en el análisis y medición de la pobreza" Brief note (p. 34) in “Tiempo urbano, acceso y desarrollo humano", Cuadernos de Desarrollo Humano I (Human Development Notebooks I), PNUD (UNDP) 2013 CDH I (Spanish)
"Impuestos y gasto publico: un ejercicio de equidad fiscal para el Uruguay", Macroeconomia del Desarrollo, CEPAL (Aug 2016). Report elaborated within the team of the Social Policy Advisory (2014) of the Budget and Planning Office of the Presidency of Uruguay. [link to the Report (Spanish)]
PhD thesis
PhD Thesis: Empirical essays on the effects of the economic cycle on human capital, health and fertility. Link UAntwerp Library
