This study estimates non-take-up rates for three German means-tested benefits and examines their determinants. While prior research has largely focused on basic income support, less is known about housing allowance (“Wohngeld”) and supplementary child benefits (“Kinderzuschlag”), despite their rising importance and related nature. Employing a microsimulation model based on official Mikrozensus data that replicates the German tax and benefit system, the analysis reveals higher non-take-up rates for housing allowance and supplementary child benefits compared to basic income support. Moreover, cross-benefit analysis indicates that participation in one scheme may affect engagement in others, while regression results offer novel insights into access barriers.

This paper examines the impact of Japan’s consumption taxes on the income distribution from 1989 to 2014. Using micro-level data from the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NFSIE), we apply statutory tax rates to calculate exact consumption tax burdens for each household and measure its redistributive effect by Reynolds-Smolensky index. The results suggest that consumption taxes in Japan are regressive and thus increasingly offset the redistribution efforts made by income taxes. The fixed income and consumption approach further confirms that changes in household spending and saving patterns have magnified this anti-redistributive effect. The findings underscore the need for targeted policy measures to reduce the burden on low-income groups.

Behavioral microsimulation models can be used to supplement results from non-behavioral tax-benefit models in policy-making. However, the policy analyst may not always have access to a fully developed behavioral simulation model for the policy issue in question. Here we draw attention to an alternative, which implies describing behavioral effects by using response estimates from other studies. We refer to this approach as “using external evidence”. We illustrate how tax revenue and distributional effect estimates can be derived by integrating external tax elasticity estimates into a non-behavioral tax-benefit model. The framework is illustrated using two examples from Norwegian tax policy.