Iva Valentinova Tasseva

I am an Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  I previously worked as a researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, where I completed my PhD in Economics.

I am a member of the Welfare and Policy society (WAP). I am an invited expert at the Steering Committee for the "Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and Economic and Social Research Institute joint Research Programme 2023-2024", with a focus on Economic Equality. I was previously an elected member of the EUROMOD Scientific Advisory Board. 

My research interests include:

• inequality and household living standards

• the redistributive effects of income tax and social security benefit policies

• tax-benefit microsimulation

• measurement errors in the income reports in household surveys

My CV    -   Google Scholar   -  IDEAS/RePEc   -   ORCiD

Contact:  i.tasseva "at" lse.ac.uk

Twitter: @IvaTasseva

New Working Papers: 

Automatic stabilization: the missing welfare dimension in Latin America (with Olivier Bargain and H. Xavier Jara)

Comparing the redistributive effects of tax-benefit systems across countries can be useful to benchmark national policy design. However, this type of analysis often forget the role of automatic stabilization, i.e. the ability of systems to mitigate income losses in times of downturn. We provide a unique international assessment using tax-benefit simulations associated with household surveys for 50 countries of three large regions (Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa). Using a well-established methodology, we show that tax-benefit systems in Latin America outperform those in Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of income redistribution and poverty reduction, but fiscal systems in both regions provide a limited degree of automatic stabilization against income shocks, in absolute terms and relative to Europe. This limited capacity is due to three factors: (i) the prevalence of a large informal sector, which limits the role of social insurance contributions and personal income taxation; (ii) the presence of high tax exemption thresholds and generous tax deductions; and (iii) the fact that cash transfer programs are not means-tested (i.e. mostly rely on  proxy means-tests), which prevents them from acting as stabilizers.