Welcome to my website.
I am emeritus professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics of KU Leuven, where I teach the course “Public Finance”. My research and publications broadly belong to “applied welfare analysis”. It concerns the construction and use of microsimulation models, with special focus on indirect taxes and labour supply; optimal taxation and the evaluation of tax reforms, with special focus on how to measure individual welfare; and empirical analysis of changes in inequality and/or poverty, both at the national and international level.
My research is based on the empirical analysis of micro data: household budget surveys, household income surveys, and administrative data. Until 2023 I have coordinated the Belgian national team in the European network of microsimulation which develops and maintains the EUROMOD-model. We expanded EUROMOD with an indirect tax module. We participated in a project led by the United Nations University WIDER in Helsinki to construct microsimulation models for several African countries. For the Flemish government we constructed a detailed model of personal income taxes (FANTASI) which runs on the fiscal declarations.
Currently we mainly work on the project BE-PARADIS (the BElgian PARADox of Inequality Studies), a 4-year research project funded by BELSPO. In collaboration with colleagues from the University of Antwerp and the Université Libre de Bruxelles we try to understand why in most studies inequality in Belgium is found to be lower and more stable than in many other OECD countries.
I was born in Avelgem (Belgium) in 1958. Presently I live in Brussels (Schaarbeek)