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
Many parts of the public sector coexist with private provision of similar services and in such circumstances we may expect to find interaction between public and private choices.
Perceptions of private benefits from hypothecated tax increases may be correlated with income either because individuals with different incomes are more or less interested in public services or because they anticipate bearing different shares of the implied tax burden.
This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting. It highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality.
This paper examines the role of individual and household characteristics in explaining patterns of support for higher public spending on seven of the most important public spending programmes including health, education, the police and defence.
We develop a method which has the main advantage over alternatives of allowing us to combine appealing budget share specifications with a model of quality choice in a way which is fully consistent with demand theory.
