Documentation IZAΨMOD: The IZA Policy SImulation MODel This paper describes IZAΨMOD, the policy microsimulation model of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). The model uses household microdata from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study and firm data from the German linked employer-employee dataset LIAB. IZAΨMOD consists of three components: First, a static module simulates the effects of ...

Ž . This paper investigates the significance of induced technological change ITC for the attractiveness of CO abatement policies. We use analytical and numerical general equilib2 rium models in which technological change results from profit-maximizing investments in R&D. We show that carbon abatement policies have very different impacts on R&D across industries, and do not necessarily raise the...

We motivate the formulation of market equilibrium as a mixed complementarity problem which explicitly represents weak inequalities and complementarity between decision variables and equilibrium conditions. The complementarity format permits an energy-economy model to combine technological detail of a bottom-up energy system with a second-best characterization of the overall economy. Our primary...

Brazil’s inequalities in welfare and poverty between and within regions can be accounted by differences in household attributes and returns to those attributes. Using Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions at the mean as well as at different quantiles of welfare distributions on regionally representative household survey data (2002-03 POF), this paper finds that household attributes account for most of ...

It is vividly debated how the ongoing process of European integration will a¤ect the need and scope for welfare state activities. To some this process signals that welfare state activities have to be rolled back, while others stress that international integration may increase the need for (explicit or implicit) social insurance arrangements. This paper discusses these issues by first considerin...

The logsum formula, which provides the expected maximum utility for the multinomial logit model, is often used as a measure of welfare. We provide here a closed form formula of the welfare measure of an individual who has not access to his first-best choice, but has access to his rth-best choice, r = 2, ...n, where n is the number of alternatives. The derivation is based on a standard identity ...

This paper investigates analytically the welfare effects of black-market activities that firms undertake to evade taxes. The desirability of a black market is linked to the attributes of the goods supplied by blackmarket firms. The analysis identifies cases where a black market reduces (increases) the distortionary impact of taxation on the allocation of resources across the goods that the gove...

We propose a decomposition of social welfare when consumers have quasi-linear utility functions under certain conditions satisfied in many models of imperfect competition. In our decomposition, social welfare is expressed as the sum of consumers’ gross utilities and trade surplus of non-numeraire commodities, which contribute to consumers’ utilities non-linearly. This decomposition is useful es...

A Theoretical Model of the Chinese Labor Market This paper constructs a theoretical labor market model for China, and utilizes the model to examine the effects of various labor market policies on economic well-being. Two key features of the model are a segmented labor market involving three sectors – state-owned enterprises, private enterprises, and agriculture – and China’s unique household re...

Traditional tools of welfare economics identify the envy-related welfare loss from conspicuous consumption only under very strong assumptions. Measured income and life satisfaction offers an alternative for estimating such consumption externalities. The approach is developed in the context of luxury car consumption (Ferraris and Porsches) in Switzerland. Results from household panel data and fi...