Dr Barra Roantree

Research Fellow Trinity College Dublin

Barra is an IFS Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of Economics and Programme Director of the MSc in Economic Policy at Trinity College Dublin. He previously worked at the IFS between 2012 and 2018. Barra's work is focused on taxation, welfare and pensions.

Education

PhD Economics, University College London, 2018

MSc Economics, Trinity College Dublin, 2012

BA (First Class Honours) Economics, Trinity College Dublin, 2011

Contact

Email
Email
Website
https://www.esri.ie/people/barra-roantree
Orcid number
0000-0002-8738-8225

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Dr Barra Roantree: all content

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Year

Showing 1 – 20 of 57 results

Journal graphic

Frictions and taxpayer responses: evidence from bunching at personal tax thresholds

Journal article

This paper exploits kinks and notches in the UK personal tax schedule over a 40-year period to investigate how taxpayers respond to income tax and social security contributions. It also develops a new approach for identifying selection in who responds and for decomposing responses into hours and wage components.

20 August 2020

London skyscrapers

The characteristics and incomes of the top 1%

Report

The richest members of our society get a lot of attention. Much of the public conversation about economic inequality is concerned with, loosely, the top 1%, how different they are from the rest, how they got to where they are, and what – if anything – policy should do about it. This briefing note uses data from HMRC’s income tax records to document some key facts about the highest-income people in the country.

6 August 2019

Publication graphic

The rise and rise of women’s employment in the UK

Report

Over the past 40 years, the UK has seen an almost continual rise in the proportion of women in employment. The employment rate among women of ‘prime working age’ (aged 25-54) is up from 57% in 1975 to a record high of 78% in 2017.

27 April 2018

Journal graphic

What a difference a day makes: inequality and the tax and benefit system from a long-run perspective

Journal article

Most analyses of inequality and tax and benefit reforms are based on measures of individuals’ circumstances at a point in time. But strong age-profiles in earnings, among other characteristics that the tax and benefit system conditions upon, combined with individuals’ ability to transfer resources across time suggests that measuring circumstances over longer horizons may lead to a very different picture. In this article, we consider how our impression of inequality and the tax and benefit system changes when the horizon under consideration is extended.

1 March 2018

Article graphic

Who benefits from benefits?

Comment

Debates about welfare policy often discuss benefit recipients as though they are a fixed, relatively small group of people. In reality, people’s circumstances fluctuate frequently over their lifetimes, often dramatically and in ways that matter hugely for entitlements to benefits. People’s health changes, they move in and out of work, their earnings vary, and children come and go. In new research, IFS researchers use data which tracks the same individuals over long periods of time to provide a longer-run perspective on people’s interactions with the benefits system.

1 March 2018

Article graphic

Scotland’s income tax schedule to differ from rest of the UK for first time

Comment

From tomorrow, Scottish residents will for the first time be subject to a different income tax schedule from those resident elsewhere in the UK. This is because of the Scottish parliament’s decision to use recently devolved powers over income tax bands and rates for non-savings and non-dividend income to freeze the higher-rate threshold (the point at which the rate of income tax rises from 20% to 40%) for the new financial year. Doing so exacerbates some existing deficiencies that afflict the tax system throughout the UK, and highlights the continuing need for tax reform.

5 April 2017

Working paper graphic

Mobility and the lifetime distributional impact of tax and transfer reforms

Working Paper

The distributional impact of proposed reforms plays a central role in public debates around tax and transfer policy. We show that accounting for realistic patterns of mobility in employment, earnings and household circumstances over the life-cycle greatly affects our assessment of the distributional effects of tax and transfer reforms.

9 September 2016