Since the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Brexit has become the policy area that dominates debate in the UK. It defined Theresa May’s government and will undoubtedly consume much of the government’s time and energy over the next few years, regardless of how the Brexit agenda evolves or who is in power.
This paper estimates how much additional work capacity there might be among men and women aged between 55 and 74 in the United Kingdom, given their health, and how this has evolved over the last decade.
We document employment rates of older men and women in the UK over the last forty years. In both cases growth in employment since the mid 1990s has been stronger than for younger age groups. On average, older men are still less likely to be in work than they were in the mid 1970s although this is not true for those with low education. We highlight issues with using years of schooling as a measure of educational achievement for analysing labour market trends at older ages, not least because a large proportion of men who left school at young ages without any formal qualifications, have subsequently acquired some.
The nature of the relationship between lifetime income and saving rates is a longstanding empirical question and one that has been surprisingly difficult to answer. We use a new data set containing both individual survey data on wealth holdings and administrative data on earnings histories to examine this question.
‘Retirement Incentives and Labor Supply’ in A. Woodland and J. Piggott (eds) Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, Chapter 1, Vol 1B, Elsevier.
We examine the impact of increasing the early retirement age (ERA) for women in a context where the financial incentive to retire at the ERA is very limited.
April 6th marks the first day of the new state pension: everyone reaching state pension age after today will accrue entitlement to, and claim, a state pension under the new rules. Legislated for by the coalition government in 2013, this is the most radical overhaul of state pension policy in the UK for decades. The new system will ultimately be much simpler than the complicated rules for calculating entitlement that are being replaced, but there will still be complexity in the short-run, and many may be disappointed not to receive the full ‘single tier’ or ‘flat-rate’ amount (£155.65 per week) that they might have started to expect.
We use comparable data from the US and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of assets among households aged 70 and over.
This chapter looks at the risks to tax revenues regarding the Chancellor's ambitious target to eliminate the budget deficit by 2019–20 and then to continue to run budget surpluses thereafter.
The government intends to reach a budget surplus of 0.5% of national income in 2019–20 by increasing tax revenues over this parliament by 1.1% of national income and reducing total public spending by 3.2% of national income. Total public spending (excluding housing associations) in 2019–20 would then amount to 36.1% of national income. This would be the lowest level of public spending for 60 years, with the exception of 1999–2000 and 2000–01.
This paper uses comparable data from the U.S. and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of assets among households age 70 and older.
