Ian is a Research Fellow of the IFS and a Professor of Economics at UCL. He joined UCL in 1991 and has been attached to the IFS since 1990. His research at the IFS includes work on household welfare measurement and distributional analysis, consumption and demand behaviour, attitudes to public spending, political economy and the economics of immigration.
Education
PhD Economics, Nuffield College, Oxford, 1989
PhM Economics, Nuffield College, Oxford, 1987
BA Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Brasenose College, Oxford, 1985
Sir James Mirrlees, co‐recipient of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, passed away in August 2018. This article outlines how his work has transformed economists’ understanding of their discipline – from the principles of tax design to the theory of contracts and beyond.
The impact of immigration on the public finances is an important influence on public opinion. In this study, Ian Preston sets out the channels by which immigration can affect the public finances.
This paper sets out some issues which must be tackled in modelling the impact of changes to public service spending and discusses some approaches that are being undertaken in other countries.
The impact of immigration on the public finances is an important influence on public opinion. This paper aims to provide a thorough conceptual survey, pointing out the complexities of a full understanding and the relevance of indirect effects and covering both static perspectives and longer run dynamic issues.
We develop a new approach to the decomposition of income risk within a nonstationary model of intertemporal choice. The approach allows for changes in income risk over the life cycle and across the business cycle, allowing for mixtures of persistent and transitory components in the dynamic process for income. We focus on what can be learned from repeated cross-section data alone. Evidence from a stochastic simulation of consumption choices in a nonstationarity environment is used to show the robustness of the method for decomposing income risk. The approach is used to investigate the changes in income risk in Britain across the inequality growth period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. We document peaks in the variance of permanent shocks at the time of recessions.
Assessing the impact of government activity on the distribution of household living standards is essential to the evaluation of public service provision but raises challenging conceptual issues that we discuss in this paper.
The Spending Review, to be finalised later this month, will provide detail regarding the large reductions in spending on public services that will be implemented over the next four years. The estimation of the distributional impacts of cuts in spending on public services is substantially more challenging than the estimation of the distributional impact of changes to taxation and the payment of cash benefits. For many reasons analyses of the former should be interpreted very cautiously.
This paper concerns the decomposition of income risk into permanent and transitory components using repeated cross-section data on income and consumption.
This paper describes the transmission of income inequality into consumption inequality and in so doing investigates the degree of insurance to income shocks.
