CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Limani, Donika |
|---|---|
| Title | Income Inequality of Households with Children: An Empirical Analysis of the Shifts in Hungarian Family Policy |
| Summary | In this thesis I investigate the relationship between Hungarian Family Policy and income inequality in households with children. More specifically, I exploit the shifts in policy due to changes of ruling parties to test whether their preferred policies are associated with the variations of income gap for households with children. Further, I devote particular attention to the recent reform in Family Policy, the introduction of family tax allowances. I focus solely on the poverty and inequality dimension of this policy and include only cash benefit elements as part of the analysis. A pooled OLS regression is applied to the first data source, TÁRKI Household Monitor Survey (TÁRKI Háztartás Monitor Jelentések), in order to provide an overview of the association between party rule and income gap with respect to position in the income distribution for the 2000-2014 period. A Difference-in-Differences method is followed with the second data source, the EU-SILC longitudinal micro data, to test the changes in household income due to the introduction of the tax allowance in 2011 focusing especially on the households at the bottom of the distribution. The first conclusion from this study is that families with children at the lowest income quintile face on average a 2 percent higher income gap from the population’s median in years when conservative parties are in power, whereas the coefficient on the gap for the fourth quintile loses significance once I control for social transfers. The second finding is that the introduction of the family tax allowances have no significant impact for the families at the bottom of the distribution while the rest gain on average between the ranges of HUF 8000-15000 per month adding in this way to the disparity between the two groups. These findings complement the extensive qualitative literature on inequality patterns and their relation to family policy, and confirm the previous microsimulation conclusions on the evaluation of tax allowances. |
| Supervisor | László Mátyás |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/limani_donika.pdf |
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