@TechReport{iza:izadps:dp1824,
            	author={Immervoll, Herwig and Levy, Horacio and Lietz, Christine and Mantovani, Daniela and O'Donoghue, Cathal and Sutherland, Holly and Verbist, Gerlinde},
            	title={Household Incomes and Redistribution in the European Union: Quantifying the Equalising Properties of Taxes and Benefits},
            	year={2005},
	month={Oct},
            	institution={Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)},
            	address={Bonn},
            	type={IZA Discussion Paper},
            	number={1824},
            	url={https://www.iza.org/publications/dp1824},
	abstract={The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed "redistributive effect" for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union. This relies on harmonised household micro-data representative of each national population together with simulations of entitlements to cash benefits and liabilities for taxes and social contributions. It allows us to draw a more comprehensive – and comparable – picture of the combined effects of transfers and taxes than is usually possible. We decompose the redistributive effect of tax-benefit systems to assess and compare the effectiveness of individual policies at reducing income disparities. The following categories of benefits and taxes are considered both individually and in combination: income taxes, social contributions, cash benefits designed to target the poor or redistribute inter-personally (through means-testing) as well as cash benefits intended to redistribute intra-personally across the lifecycle (through social insurance or contingency-based entitlement). We derive results for the 15 "old" members of the European Union and present them for each country separately as well as for the EU-15 as a whole. },
	keywords={microsimulation;redistribution;income inequality;European Union},
            }