Tax-Benefit Revealed Redistributive Preferences Over Time: Ireland 1987-2005

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 fiscal reforms over the period. Results are robust to numerous checks regarding data, income concepts and elasticities. A comparison with the UK shows marked differences reflecting the narrow political spectrum in Ireland compared to radical changes in British politics over the past 30 years. Some "anomalies" in the revealed social welfare function suggests introducing transfers to the working poor.social preferences, optimal taxation, labour supply

Non-Cash Benefits and the Distribution of Economic Welfare

Non-cash benefits can have substantial effects on the distribution of economic welfare. Standard approaches to the inclusion of non-cash benefits in broader measures of resources have failed to take adequate account of the pattern of needs associated with the greater use of health and education services. Our results, for Ireland in the year 2000, show that it is possible to derive more appropriate measures of total resources than have been derived using standard methods. The results indicate that the greatest impact comes from the inclusion of imputed rent for owner occupation as part of the resource measure. When this is done, the rate of "resource poverty" for older people is substantially reduced, in line with results which use indicators of standard of living as well as cash incomes ("consistent poverty").non-cash benefits, income distribution

Tax-Benefit Revealed Redistributive Preferences Over Time: Ireland 1987-2005

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 compa- rable over time and show great stability despite profound changes in market incomes and important fiscal reforms over the period. Results are robust to numerous checks regarding data, income concepts and elasticities. A comparison with the UK shows marked differences reflecting the narrow political spectrum in Ireland compared to radical changes in British politics over the past 30 years. Some "anomalies" in the revealed social welfare function suggests introducing transfers to the working poor.social preferences, optimal taxation, labour supply

Non-cash Benefits and the Distribution of Economic Welfare

Non-cash benefits can have substantial effects on the distribution of economic welfare. Standard approaches to the inclusion of non-cash benefits in broader measures of resources have failed to take adequate account of the pattern of needs associated with the greater use of health and education services. Our results, for Ireland in the year 2000, show that it is possible to derive more appropriate measures of total resources than have been derived using standard methods. The results indicate that the greatest impact comes from the inclusion of imputed rent for owner occupation as part of the resource measure. When this is done, the rate of “resource poverty” for older people is substantially reduced, in line with results which use indicators of standard of living as well as cash incomes (“consistent poverty”).

Female participation increases and gender segregation. ESRI WP564, May 2017

This article examines the impact of a large increase in female participation on occupational segregation. Increases in female participation may decrease occupational segregation if women enter male dominated sectors but may increase segregation if they enter already female dominated sectors. Using Ireland as a test case due to the recent large increase in female participation rates, we firstly carry out a decomposition analysis between 1991 and 2006 and find that the rise in female employment was driven predominantly by increased demand while between one tenth and one fifth of the rise was due to women increasing their share of occupational employment. Formal measures of segregation show that occupational segregation fell over this time period. The formal measures of segregation show that the level of occupational grouping is important with stagnation or smaller falls in segregation using a broad occupational grouping and sharper falls using a more detailed occupational grouping. Our findings support previous U.S. research that found a rise in female participation resulted in a decline in occupational segregation

Female Labor Supply and Divorce: New Evidence from Ireland

If participation in the labor market helps to secure women's outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and/or spatial variation in divorce legislation (e.g., across US states), leading to mixed results. In this paper, we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical policy change, i.e., the legalization of divorce. In Ireland, the right to divorce was introduced in 1996, followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates. We use this fundamental change in the Irish society as a natural experiment. We follow a difference-in-difference approach, using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group. Our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply, mostly at the extensive margin. Results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks, including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting.divorce law, natural experiment, labor supply, fixed effects, propensity score

Work incentives adjusting for childcare subsidies and healthcare benefits. ESRI WP634, August 2019

This paper examines the role of two non-cash transfers in the financial incentives to work in Ireland: subsidised childcare provided under the Affordable Childcare Scheme and Medical and GP-Visit Cards. Financial work incentives do not usually take account of childcare costs or non-cash benefits that may be withdrawn as a person earns more. In this paper we use SWITCH, the ESRI’s tax-benefit microsimulation model, to examine financial work incentives on both the extensive margin by means of replacement rates and participation tax rates, and the intensive margin through effective marginal tax rates. As the amount of time parents of young children spend at work results in the need to pay for childcare, the inclusion of childcare costs is shown to weaken financial work incentives. However, including childcare subsidies results in an improvement in the financial incentive to take up a job or work more. Medical and GP visit cards, on the other hand, diminish those incentives, which is due to their means-tested nature. These results illustrate the need to go beyond cash transfers in assessing financial work incentives and the importance of taking childcare costs into account

Female Labor Supply and Divorce: New Evidence from Ireland

If participation in the labor market helps to secure women's outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and/or spatial variation in divorce legislation (e.g., across US states), leading to mixed results. In this paper, we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical policy change, i.e., the legalization of divorce. In Ireland, the right to divorce was introduced in 1996, followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates. We use this fundamental change in the Irish society as a natural experiment. We follow a difference-in-difference approach, using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group. Our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply, mostly at the extensive margin. Results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks, including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting.divorce law, natural experiment, labor supply, fixed effects, propensity score

Tax-benefit systems and the gender gap in income

The gender wage gap and the gender work gap are sizable, persistent and well documented for many countries. The result of the gender wage and gender work gap combined is an income gap between men and women. A small literature has begun to examine how the tax-benefit system contributes to closing gender income gaps by redistributing between men and women. In this paper, we study the effect of tax-benefit policy on gender differences in income in the EU27 countries and the UK. We use microsimulation models linked to survey data to estimate gender gaps in market income (before taxes and transfers) and disposable income (after taxes and transfers) for each country. We then decompose the difference between the gender gap in market income and the gender gap in disposable income into the relative contribution of taxes and benefits in each country. We also isolate the relative contributions of the gender wage gap and the gender work gap to the overall gap in income between men and women in two of these countries

Learner-centered social support: enhancing online distance education for underserved rural high school students in the United States

Over the past decade, federal programs in the United States have largely addressed the well-documented problem of differences in basic access to technology between rural schools and their suburban and urban counterparts. Consequently, rural schools are better able to prepare their students for post-secondary education and the workplace where digital literacy is essential. As technology access improves, online distance education (ODE) is seen as a solution to significant challenges faced by rural schools, including a lack of highly-qualified teachers and declining population. However, ODE has high attrition rates, partly because participants’ social needs are often neglected. Additionally, students' success depends on their abilities to engage in self-regulated learning, effective time management and self-reflection, skills that many high school students are still developing. This paper describes an experimental research study funded by the U.S. Department of Education, currently underway in rural high schools across the U.S. The research adds to a growing body of work that attempts to expand understanding of the digital divide. Increasingly, schools realise that this is no longer an issue of mere access to equipment; education technology projects should incorporate strategies that ensure the success of previously marginalised communities. Our intervention, based on the APA’s Learner- Centered Principles, involves training on-site facilitators to provide social support for students involved in ODE. Preliminary findings indicate that the intervention group has a significantly lower dropout rate