Volume 73, Issue 3

Strikes can sometimes place a significant burden on affected third parties, particularly when they last for a long time, cannot be planned and affect many people or companies. This raises the question of the extent to which the effective conduct of strikes is necessary to enforce fair collective agreements or whether they could be avoided. The following discussion addresses this question from a game theoretic perspective.

The governing coalition would like to translate the existing income tax deduction for single parents into a tax relief. The aim is to treat all single parents more equally, regardless of the amount of their taxable income. We use detailed microdata from official tax returns to analyze the distributional effects of both, the present tax deduction and those of a revenue-neutral tax relief. Our analysis shows that the switch from deduction to relief will benefit single parents with low incomes. This comes at the expense of higher incomes. Overall, the number of reform winners outnumbers those of the reform losers.