This paper examines the impact of the economic crisis and the policy reaction on inequality and relative poverty in four European countries, namely France, Germany, the UK and Ireland. The period examined, 2008 to 2013, was one of great economic turmoil, yet it is unclear whether changes in inequality and poverty rates over this time period were mainly driven by changes in market income distributions or by tax-bene…t policy reforms. We disentangle these e¤ects by producing counterfactual ("no reform") scenarios using tax-bene…t microsimulation and representative household surveys for each country. For the …rst stage of the Great Recession, we …nd that the policy reaction contributed to stabilizing or even decreasing inequality and relative poverty in the UK, France and especially in Ireland. Market income changes nonetheless pushed up inequality and relative poverty in France. Relative poverty increased in Germany due to policy responses combined with market income changes. Subsequent policy reforms, in the later stage of the crisis, had markedly di¤erent cross-country e¤ects, decreasing overall poverty in France, increasing it in Ireland and giving mixed e¤ects for di¤erent sub-groups in Germany and the UK.

Ireland is one of the countries most severely affected by the Great Recession. National income fell by more than 10 per cent between 2007 and 2012, as a result of the bursting of a remarkable property bubble, an exceptionally severe banking crisis, and deep fiscal adjustment. This paper examines the income distribution consequences of the recession, and identifies the impact of a broad range of austerity policies on the income distribution. The overall fall in income was just under 8 per cent between 2008 and 2011, but the greatest losses were strongly concentrated on the bottom and top deciles. Tax, welfare and public sector pay changes over the 2008 to 2011 period gave rise to lower than average losses for the bottom decile. Thus, the larger than average losses observed overall are not due to these policy changes; instead, the main driving factors are the direct effects of the recession itself. Policy changes do contribute to the larger than average losses at high income levels.

Female Labor Supply and Divorce: New Evidence from Ireland * If participation in the labor market helps to secure women's outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and/or spatial variation in divorce legislation (e.g., across US states), leading to mixed results. In this paper, we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical policy change, i.e., the legalization of divorce. In Ireland, the right to divorce was introduced in 1996, followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates. We use this fundamental change in the Irish society as a natural experiment. We follow a difference-in-difference approach, using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group. Our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply, mostly at the extensive margin. Results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks, including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting. JEL Classification:J12, J22, D10, D13, K36