Dr Jonathan Shaw

This paper provides an empirical account of the dynamic payoff to work and how it is affected by taxes and transfers.

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.

Understanding tax non-compliance and the effectiveness of strategies to tackle it is crucial for a modern tax authority. In this paper we study how and why audits impact reported tax in the years after audit - the dynamic effect - for individual income taxpayers.

Mobility and the lifetime distributional impact of tax and transfer reforms

How taxes and welfare benefits affect work incentives: a lifecycle perspective.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation—including education, and savings for women in the United Kingdom, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy.

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.

We study students’ motives for educational attainment in a unique survey of 885 secondary school students in the UK. As expected, students who perceive the monetary returns to education to be higher are more likely to intend to continue in full-time education. However, the main driver is the perceived consumption value, which alone explains around half of the variation of the intention to pursue higher education. Moreover, the perceived consumption value can account for a substantial part of both the socio-economic gap and the gender gap in intentions to continue in full-time education.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation - including education, and savings for women in the UK, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy.

This spreadsheet contains calculations underlying the IFS report 'The Effects of Taxes and Charges on Saving Incentives in the UK' . It allows users to see how those results were calculated and to adjust the inputs (tax rates, assumed rates of return and inflation, etc.) to produce new calculations

In this report we describe the forms in which household wealth is held, we set out the effects of the current UK tax system on the incentive to save in different assets, we consider the implications of a number of reforms due to be introduced or currently under consideration, and we analyse the effect of two non-tax features – employer matching of pension contributions and fund charges – on the attractiveness of investing in different assets.

This paper investigates how our impression of redistribution undertaken by the tax and benefit system changes when viewed from a lifetime perspective. To do so, the authors simulate lifecycle data designed to be representative of the experiences of the baby-boom cohort, born 1945–54.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation - including education, and savings for women in the UK, exploiting policy changes. This was first published as an NBER working paper in March 2015.