Effects Of Changes In Tax/Benefit Policies In Austria 1998 2005

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether policy reforms in Austria between 1998 and 2005 were successful in meeting redistributive objectives and in reducing poverty. For the analysis we use the tax/benefit micro-simulation model EUROMOD. Due to the sequence of reforms and the use of two datasets, the period under review is split into two parts: 1998 to 2003 and 2003 to 2005. Important changes in the first period were the tax reform 2000, the introduction of the universal childcare benefit (ìKinderbetreuungsgeldî) as well as increases in family-targeted benefits and tax reliefs. We find that the policy reforms were in general clearly progressive and family-friendly. However, as with elderly people, the situation did not improve for all population groups at risk of poverty. In the period from 2003 to 2005 the tax reform 2004/05 was introduced and contributions to health insurance were raised. We find that the measures had no significant impact on poverty and income distribution; however, in total they increased the disposable income for almost all population groups. The analysis is completed by the assessment of the redistributive impact of two hypothetical policy changes in favour of lower income groups, namely the continuous introduction of employeesí social security contributions above the lower threshold for contributions (ìGeringf¸gigkeitsgrenzeî) and the yearly indexation of family benefits.inequality, redistribution, Austria, policy reform, micro-simulation

When Politicians Talk: Assessing Online Conversational Practices of Political Parties on Twitter

Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational practices of political parties. Following a deductive approach, we devise a number of quantitative measures from a discussion of theoretical constructs in sociological theory. The resulting measures make different - mostly qualitative - aspects of online conversational practices amenable to computation. We evaluate our computational approach by applying it in a case study. In particular, we study online conversational practices of German politicians on Twitter during the German federal election 2013. We find that political parties share some interesting patterns of behavior, but also exhibit some unique and interesting idiosyncrasies. Our work sheds light on (i) how complex cultural phenomena such as online conversational practices are amenable to quantification and (ii) the way social media such as Twitter are utilized by political parties.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, Proc. 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2014

Alternative Tax-Benefit Strategies to Support Children in the European Union. Recent Reforms in Austria, Spain and the UK

We compare three EU countries that have recently experienced substantial but very different reforms of their family support systems: Austria, Spain and the UK. The structure of these systems is different: Austria emphases universal benefits, Spain tax concessions and the UK means-tested benefits. First the paper compares the distributional implications of these three approaches. The recent reforms have reinforced existing structures while increasing the amount of spending for children. The second step is to ask: What would have happened if these countries had transformed the architecture of their systems in either of the other two directions? We use EUROMOD, the European tax-benefit microsimulation model that is designed for making cross-country comparisons and answering “what if” questions such as these. We find that the three factors that can be distinguished – the level of spending, its structure, and the way it impacts in a national context – are all important to varying degrees.Children, European Union, Policy Reform, Microsimulation

Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists

Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career ages

Improving student learning in Mali

ACER has been working over the past two years to help develop an internal monitoring and evaluation system in Mali