We compare directions of welfare improving marginal tax reform in a situation of involuntary unem... more We compare directions of welfare improving marginal tax reform in a situation of involuntary unemployment. We show the role of distributional considerations in assessing these welfare effects: preferences between macroeconomic variables shift with the degree of inequality aversion. To get a better insight into the importance of distributional considerations in different models, we compare the marginal welfare costs of taxation within three different specifications: the Keynesian regime, a flexible prices/fixed wage-model, and a flexible prices/trade union wage-model. These various models are calibrated for Belgian data of 1980. It turns out that the choice of model matters, even in a marginal perspective. The empirical results also show how the welfare costs in the different models vary with the degree of inequality aversion.
We compute optimal linear taxes on labor income with quasilinear preferences between income and l... more We compute optimal linear taxes on labor income with quasilinear preferences between income and labor. Agents differ in their productivity and in their taste for leisure. A responsibility sensitive egalitarian wants to compensate for the former differences but not for the latter. This intuition is captured by a social planner that wants to equalize opportunities for subjective utility along the lines of the criteria proposed by Roemer and Van de gaer, and by a social planner evaluating social states based on an advantage function representing reference preferences. Our theoretical results are illustrated with empirical data for Belgium.
In this paper we investigate the evolution of the inequality in well-being across dierent countri... more In this paper we investigate the evolution of the inequality in well-being across dierent countries between 1975 and 2000. We treat well-being as a multidimensional concept focusing on three important dimensions of life: standard of living, health and education. Inequality in the three di- mensions shows a dierent trend between 1975 and 2000. We propose a ‡exible measure of well-being
Background: Belgium has dominantly fee for service remuneration with fixed official tariffs for m... more Background: Belgium has dominantly fee for service remuneration with fixed official tariffs for medical and paramedical interventions, implants and nursing and hotel costs in hospital. On top of these tariffs there is a large degree of freedom to charge additional fees, so-called supplements. Protective legislation limits this freedom in common rooms and for people with preferential insurance status (reflecting weaker socio-economic groups). Objective: The objective of this paper is to analyse how the freedom to set prices is used by the providers and to evaluate the impact of the protective regulation. Methods: Data on 55,000 hospitalisations, retrieved from an administrative database and relating to all hospitalisations of a representative sample of 300,000 individuals for 2003 are used. To approximate the price setting behavior of hospitals we calculate 'unit supplement prices' by taking the ratio of supplements over total official health care expenditures. This is done a...
Objectives: While policymakers already debated a lot on co-payments, there is an increasing conce... more Objectives: While policymakers already debated a lot on co-payments, there is an increasing concern about the huge increase of supplements as well. In this study we investigate the distribution of the burden of supplements. We want to describe the characteristics of the payer of supplements. Methodology: We use an administrative dataset of the different sickness funds with annual data for 2003 of a representative sample of about 300,000 individuals. We define supplements as the difference between the total amount paid by the patient and the official price (reimbursements from the health insurance co-payments); or as the total amount itself if there are no reimbursements. We estimate different specifications of the model. First, we start with a benchmark: OLS of the expenditures on several independent variables. Two-part models with logistic specification in the first part and different specifications in the second part (OLS, OLS on log expenditures and gamma with log specification) ...
We compare directions of welfare improving marginal tax reform in a situation of involuntary unem... more We compare directions of welfare improving marginal tax reform in a situation of involuntary unemployment. We show the role of distributional considerations in assessing these welfare effects: preferences between macroeconomic variables shift with the degree of inequality aversion. To get a better insight into the importance of distributional considerations in different models, we compare the marginal welfare costs of taxation within three different specifications: the Keynesian regime, a flexible prices/fixed wage-model, and a flexible prices/trade union wage-model. These various models are calibrated for Belgian data of 1980. It turns out that the choice of model matters, even in a marginal perspective. The empirical results also show how the welfare costs in the different models vary with the degree of inequality aversion.
We compute optimal linear taxes on labor income with quasilinear preferences between income and l... more We compute optimal linear taxes on labor income with quasilinear preferences between income and labor. Agents differ in their productivity and in their taste for leisure. A responsibility sensitive egalitarian wants to compensate for the former differences but not for the latter. This intuition is captured by a social planner that wants to equalize opportunities for subjective utility along the lines of the criteria proposed by Roemer and Van de gaer, and by a social planner evaluating social states based on an advantage function representing reference preferences. Our theoretical results are illustrated with empirical data for Belgium.
In this paper we investigate the evolution of the inequality in well-being across dierent countri... more In this paper we investigate the evolution of the inequality in well-being across dierent countries between 1975 and 2000. We treat well-being as a multidimensional concept focusing on three important dimensions of life: standard of living, health and education. Inequality in the three di- mensions shows a dierent trend between 1975 and 2000. We propose a ‡exible measure of well-being
Background: Belgium has dominantly fee for service remuneration with fixed official tariffs for m... more Background: Belgium has dominantly fee for service remuneration with fixed official tariffs for medical and paramedical interventions, implants and nursing and hotel costs in hospital. On top of these tariffs there is a large degree of freedom to charge additional fees, so-called supplements. Protective legislation limits this freedom in common rooms and for people with preferential insurance status (reflecting weaker socio-economic groups). Objective: The objective of this paper is to analyse how the freedom to set prices is used by the providers and to evaluate the impact of the protective regulation. Methods: Data on 55,000 hospitalisations, retrieved from an administrative database and relating to all hospitalisations of a representative sample of 300,000 individuals for 2003 are used. To approximate the price setting behavior of hospitals we calculate 'unit supplement prices' by taking the ratio of supplements over total official health care expenditures. This is done a...
Objectives: While policymakers already debated a lot on co-payments, there is an increasing conce... more Objectives: While policymakers already debated a lot on co-payments, there is an increasing concern about the huge increase of supplements as well. In this study we investigate the distribution of the burden of supplements. We want to describe the characteristics of the payer of supplements. Methodology: We use an administrative dataset of the different sickness funds with annual data for 2003 of a representative sample of about 300,000 individuals. We define supplements as the difference between the total amount paid by the patient and the official price (reimbursements from the health insurance co-payments); or as the total amount itself if there are no reimbursements. We estimate different specifications of the model. First, we start with a benchmark: OLS of the expenditures on several independent variables. Two-part models with logistic specification in the first part and different specifications in the second part (OLS, OLS on log expenditures and gamma with log specification) ...
Uploads
Papers by Erik Schokkaert