Peering into the black box: Using microsimulation methods to evaluate the gendered impact of taxes and transfers

Silvia Avram and Daria Popova

Chapter 5 in A Research Agenda for Financial Resources within the Household, 2024, pp 79-93 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Unitary models of household behaviour and decision-making remain the mainstream of academic research and official statistics of income and living standards, despite extensive evidence contradicting their assumptions. The main difficulty in moving beyond unitary models in empirical analysis has been how to deal with intra-household allocation issues satisfactorily. We show here how microsimulation models are a tool to go beyond assumptions of complete pooling and equal sharing when examining the gendered effects of tax/benefit policies. We discuss the principles and assumptions behind microsimulation models and highlight their strengths and weaknesses in dealing with intra-household allocation issues. After reviewing the limited literature using microsimulation to examine gender and/or intra-household inequality, we show how these models can be improved by combining them with information on income pooling from surveys to create more realistic scenarios of partial pooling in particular. We conclude by reviewing possible policy applications and suggesting future directions for research.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781802204001.00013 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21117_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().