Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful
tax-benefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably,
most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function –
typically inequality or poverty indices – of household equivalized income. In parallel, economic
research has made considerable progress in the measurement of welfare along several
dimensions. Distinct but related branches of the literature have attempted (i) to model different
behavior (in a way that matter for incidence and redistribution of tax-benefit policies),
(ii) to go beyond income, (iii) to better define and estimate equivalence scales, (iv) to open
the household black box and measure welfare at the individual level. I suggest a general
framework to critically review these streams of literatures and to discuss whether recent
advances in each of these fields have been or could be readily operationalized in welfare
analyses and policy simulations.

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• Welfare analysis and redistributive policies