Jonathan is a Technical Specialist in the Economics Department at the Financial Conduct Authority and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Jonathan is an economist and data scientist whose research focuses on understanding household finances, investigating the effects of taxes and benefits across life and applying data science techniques to address economic questions. Before joining the Financial Conduct Authority, he was Programme Director for Economic Data Science at the Alan Turing Institute, and prior to that he worked at the IFS for almost 15 years, the last four of which as Deputy Director of the Tax Administration Research Centre. He has done work for government departments in the UK and abroad, regulators and private charitable foundations and has provided economic advice to a wide variety of policymakers in governmental and quasi-governmental organisations. He did his PhD in economics at University College London under Professor Sir Richard Blundell.
As the Government and Opposition alike ponder how best to repair Britain's battered public finances, the Green Budget looks at some of the salient economic issues.
This report describes a scoping study to understand more about the nature of the 'costs of compliance' that claimants of social security benefits and (personal) tax credits incur, and discusses possible ways of measuring such costs.
The Green Budget argues that 20 billion pounds of further tax increases or spending cuts may be needed by the end of the next Parliament if the public finances are to improve as the Treasury hoped in last year's Pre-Budget Report.