Fiscal Studies

March 2026

A symposium on technological change and the labour market

Editors: Monica Costa Dias, Maarten Goos and Matthias Parey

Rapid technical change that can be swiftly adopted by firms to improve production processes may create considerable challenges to workers, societies and policymakers. There are signs that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) could spread rather quickly. The level of disruption it may create will depend on whether the pace of adoption allows for workers to adjust their skills and adapt to the new demands of jobs. In this symposium, we bring together a set of papers that investigate questions related to technological change, AI and labour markets. The papers revisit the role of new technology in declining labour shares, propose a new approach to measuring technological change in the labour market, and consider technology adoption in firms with different wage setting arrangements.

A symposium on technological change and the labour market: preface - Monica Costa Dias, Maarten Goos and Matthias Parey

Latent changes in the labour share - Maarten Goos and Ellen van't Klooster

AI-powered skill classification: mapping technology intensity in the German labour market - Sabrina Genz, Terry Gregory and Florian Lehmer

Automation and collective agreements - Sabrina Genz and Emilie Rademakers

December 2025: A symposium on spatial inequality and economic divergence in the UK

Editors: James Banks, Monica Costa Dias and Sonya Krutikova

This symposium issue of Fiscal Studies brings together three papers that examine how, and why, the places where people grow up, live and work shape their opportunities in England. The issue is inspired by Paul Collier's book, Left Behind, summarised in an overview written by Collier for this symposium, which looks at these questions in the global context, including the UK. Each paper looks at a different aspect of the broader question of how place influences opportunity, offering new evidence and perspectives. Read together, they also offer insights into the connections between these different aspects, giving a fuller picture than each paper can provide on its own and adding nuance to the policy implications that follow.

September 2025: A symposium on power in experiments – New practical insights and tools

Editors: Monica Costa Dias and Marcos Vera-Hernández

The use of randomised control trials (RCTs) has become widespread in economics and other social sciences, and is likely to grow further as new digital tools and increasingly rich data facilitate the design and implementation of experiments. When rigorously designed and implemented, they have the potential to offer the most reliable empirical evidence on the causal impact of an intervention. But for that potential to be realised, RCTs need to be sufficiently powered to detect a meaningful effect, or to say confidently that the effect is negligible. This symposium offers practical insights for researchers on designing more powerful experiments and computing the required sample size, accompanied by tools that researchers can use in designing their own RCTs.

March 2025: A symposium on poverty, the safety net and child development

Editors: Monica Costa Dias and Emma Tominey, with Vivan Zhao

Recent rises in cost of living, combined with increasingly tight public budgets that pressure governments into cutting welfare spending, have renewed attention to the plights of disadvantaged families and the potential long term consequences of living in poverty during childhood. These concerns are justified by mounting empirical evidence showing that the health, education and future labour market outcomes of children are strongly associated with the financial resources of their parental families. Yet, evidence on the extent to which income or poverty impacts child outcomes remains scarce. On the policy side, the consequences of growing up in poverty and the role of the safety net in attenuating long-lasting disadvantage is a matter that attracts huge attention. Many have argued that those policies can be self-financing, by supporting the healthy childhood experiences and the formation of skills that promote successful educational and labour market trajectories.

This symposium is concerned with two key questions. First, does the experience of living in poverty as a child leave long-lasting scars as the child ages into adulthood? And second, can the government safety net mitigate these impacts? The three papers in this symposium offer insightful and complementary perspectives on the current understanding of child poverty and its consequences for later economic outcomes.

March 2024: A symposium on tax and welfare policy – New perspectives on old issues

Editors: James Banks, Monica Costa Dias, Matthias Parey, Kimberley Scharf and James P. Ziliak

When we established the idea of symposia in Fiscal Studies, our intention was to provide a location for diverse sets of papers, allowing for a more flexible format and content than typically found in academic economics journals. In addition to short papers on specific policy issues or choices, or discussing methods or data resources, we also wanted to include thought pieces and reflections by senior researchers in order to discuss the current understanding of key topics in public and applied microeconomics and to suggest important open questions and potential avenues for future investigation as well as areas for broad policy change. 

This symposium embodies those ambitions with contributions from two of the most eminent academic researchers working in public and labour economics – Professor Joel Slemrod from the University of Michigan and Professor Sir Richard Blundell from University College London – and companion pieces from Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, and Antoine Bozio, the director of the Institut des Politiques Publiques in Paris. All four have contributed immensely, and in diverse ways, to the study and current understanding of taxes and benefits, their design and their impact on people, inequalities and the economy. All four are also especially generous members of the profession, having worked tirelessly to bridge the gaps between the academic and public debates on taxes and welfare and to train the next generation of public economists.

Fiscal Studies is a forum for original contributions in public and applied economics. Its goal is to promote a broad and rigorous discussion of public policy, contributing to advancing the academic understanding of policy design and its impacts, and to informing policymaking and its public debate. To that end, the journal publishes articles studying the behaviour of individuals and firms, their responses to public policy and the wider effects of government action on the economy, with emphasis on the application of microeconomic insights and empirical methods. Articles are presented in a clear and accessible format designed to appeal to a broad international readership of academics, policymakers and practitioners.

Journal issues are published quarterly and are usually formed of two sections. One section is dedicated to symposia, which are collections of papers in selected topical themes, offering perspectives from leading academics and practitioners in the area. The symposia will serve various purposes, such as summarising active and new areas of research, providing timely analysis of key policy-related topics, overviewing specific resources for research and policy analysis such as data or methods, or offering state-of-the-art but accessible views of a research area that could, for instance, be used in the classroom. The majority of these papers are solicited by the editors and associate editors.

The other section is populated by contributed papers. We encourage submissions from individuals not associated with the Institute and from international institutions, particularly from academic economists working on applied problems whose results have topical policy application. Contributed papers are externally refereed to ensure both the quality and impartiality of the journal. To maintain the topicality of the journal, submissions will be refereed quickly.
 

Public economics, labour markets, education, applied microeconomics, applied micro-econometrics, taxation and welfare, public finance, inequality, individual and family behaviour, ageing.

Lead Editor

Monica Costa Dias, University of Bristol, UK; Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK

Editors

James Banks, University of Manchester, UK; Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
Pierre Cahuc, Sciences Po, France
Peter Levell, Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
Matthias Parey, University of Surrey, UK
Kimberley Scharf, University of Birmingham, UK
James P. Ziliak, University of Kentucky, USA

Advisory Board

Sir Richard Blundell (Chair), University College London, UK
Rachel Griffith, University of Manchester, UK
Hilary Hoynes, University of California at Berkeley, USA
Joel Slemrod, University of Michigan, USA

Associate Editors

Stuart Adam, Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
Arun Advani, University of Warwick UK; Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
Antoine Bozio, Paris School of Economics, France
Jonathan Colmer, University of Virginia, USA
Richard Disney, University of Sussex, UK
Eric French, University of Cambridge, UK; Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
Clemens Fuest, Ifo Institute and University of Munich, Germany
Egbert Jongen, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis; Leiden University, Netherlands
Sonya Krutikova, Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
Eric Ohrn, Grinnell College, USA
Johannes Spinnewijn, London School of Economics, UK
Emma Tominey, University of York, UK
Marcos Vera-Hernández, University College London, UK; Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
Mazhar Waseem, University of Manchester, UK

Editorial Office

Will Haynes
Emma Hyman 
Contact: @email

Production Editors

Rachel Lumpkin
Judith Payne, Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
 

Citation Impact (more details here)

2024 CiteScore (Scopus): 13.6
2024 Journal Citation Indicator (Clarivate): 0.56
2024 Journal Impact Factor (Clarivate): 1.3
2024 Journal Impact Factor ranking (against Economics journals): 332/617

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2024 Acceptance rate: 16%
2024 Submission to first decision: 27 Days