Search

This paper analyses the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on household disposable income and household demand in the European Union (EU), making use of the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD and nowcasting techniques. We show evidence of heterogeneity in the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour markets in EU Member States, with some countries hit substantially harder than others. Most EU Member States experience a large drop in market incomes in 2020, with poorer households hit the hardest. Tax-benefit systems cushioned significantly the transmission of the shock to the disposable income and the household demand, with monetary compensation schemes playing a major role. Additionally, we show that monetary compensation schemes prevent a significant share of households from becoming liquidity constrained during the pandemic.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on German household income using a micro-level approach. We combine a microsimulation model with labour market transition techniques to simulate the COVID-19 shock on the German labour market. We find the consequences of the labour market shock to be highly regressive with a strong impact on the poorest households. However, this effect is nearly entirely offset by automatic stabilisers and discretionary policy measures. We explore the cushioning effect of these policies in detail, showing that short-time working schemes and especially the one-off payments for children are effective in cushioning the income loss of the poor.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on German household income using a micro-level approach. We combine a microsimulation model with labour market transition techniques to simulate the COVID-19 shock on the German labour market. We find the consequences of the labour market shock to be highly regressive with a strong impact on the poorest households. However, this effect is nearly entirely offset by automatic stabilisers and discretionary policy measures. We explore the cushioning effect of these policies in detail, showing that short-time working schemes and especially the one-off payments for children are effective in cushioning the income loss of the poor.

Supplemental material, Penne_appendix for To what extent do welfare states compensate for the cost of children? The joint impact of taxes, benefits and public goods and services by Tess Penne, Tine Hufkens, Tim Goedemé and Bérénice Storms in Journal of European Social Policy

This paper introduces the Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT), a new extension of EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union. With HHoT, users can easily create their own hypothetical data, which enables them to better understand how policies work for households with specific characteristics. The tool creates unique possibilities for an enhanced analysis of taxes and social benefits in Europe by integrating results from microsimulations and hypothetical household simulations in a single modelling framework. Furthermore, the flexibility of HHoT facilitates an advanced use of hypothetical household simulations to create new comparative policy indicators in the context of multi-country and longitudinal analyses. In this paper, we highlight the main features of HHoT, its strengths and limitations, and illustrate how it can be used for comparative policy purposes.

Expanding childcare is often considered as a suitable way to enhance employment opportunities of mothers with young children as well as to reduce child poverty. In this study the authors critically investigate this assertion by simulating a set of scenarios of increasing subsidized childcare slots and mothers' employment. For a variety of European welfare states we estimate the impact on poverty and on the government budget using the European microsimulation model EUROMOD. The findings suggest that to achieve significant poverty reductions among young children, both additional childcare slots and increased mothers' employment should be well targeted. The expenditures for additional childcare slots can to a large extent be recovered by the government receipts generated by the additional employment; however, there appears to be a trade-off between the extra revenue that can be generated and the extent of poverty reduction.

nrpages: 44 status: published

EUROMOD is a tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union (EU) that enables researchers and policy analysts to calculate, in a comparable manner, the effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes and work incentives for the population of each country and for the EU as a whole. EUROMOD has been enlarged to cover 27 Member States and is updated to recent policy systems using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) as the input database, supported by DG-EMPL of the European Commission. This report documents the work done in one annual update for Belgium. This work was carried out by the EUROMOD core developer team, based mainly in ISER at the University of Essex, in collaboration with a national team. EUROMOD coordinator: Holly Sutherland EUROMOD coordination assistant: Cara McGenn EUROMOD developer responsible for Belgium: Olga Rastrigina National team for Belgium: Gerlinde Verbist, Josefine Vanhille & Tine Hufkens (University of Antwerp), André Decoster & Kevin Spiritus (University of Leuven). This report accompanies the release of EUROMOD G1.0. There maybe minor differences between the results presented here and those obtained with G1.0 due to further improvements since the report was prepared. For more information, see: http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/euromod status: published

Supplemental material, Hufkens_Appendix for Investing in subsidized childcare to reduce poverty by Tine Hufkens, Francesco Figari, Dieter Vandelannoote and Gerlinde Verbist in Journal of European Social Policy

Supplemental material, Hufkens_Appendix for Investing in subsidized childcare to reduce poverty by Tine Hufkens, Francesco Figari, Dieter Vandelannoote and Gerlinde Verbist in Journal of European Social Policy