Professor Mike Brewer

We study the potential impact of expanding childcare subsidies to increase the labour force participation of parents with young children.

Income inequality, as well as the impact of tax and benefit reforms on it, has typically been evaluated with respect to ‘snapshot’ incomes, measured over short periods such as one week or year.

Many governments are considering expanding childcare subsidies to increase the labour force participation of parents (especially mothers) with young children.

This paper reviews the role of in‐work tax credits in the UK and the US.

This paper provides new evidence on the incidence of rent subsidies.

A substantial body of research on the UK’s National Minimum Wage (NMW) has concluded that the the NMW has not had a detrimental effect on employment. This research has directly influenced, through the Low Pay Commission, the conduct of policy, including the subsequent introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW).

In this research we investigate who wins and loses from universal credit, and by how much. For the first time, we also look at the effects of universal credit on people’s incomes over eight years of their lives, rather than just at a point in time. This lets us look at the impact on those that are persistently, rather than temporarily, low income.

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

We examine the effectiveness of two time-limited in-work benefits. These were introduced in Great Britain in the early to mid 2000s and were known as ‘in work credit’ (IWC) and the ‘Employment Retention and Advancement demonstration’ (ERA).

We document that households in the UK with extremely low measured income tend to spend much more than those with merely moderately low income. This phenomenon is evident throughout three decades worth of microdata and across different employment states, levels of education and marital statuses.