Reports

Even short financial education programmes can change how adolescents make intertemporal choices - the basis of consumption and savings decisions, and more sophisticated financial decision-making more generally.

Five years on from the localisation and funding cut for Council Tax Support, this report looks at how local authorities’ Council Tax Support schemes have evolved since they were first introduced, and at the changing effects of these scheme choices on claimants and on local authorities.

A healthier population is likely to be more economically productive (and to need less spending on healthcare and health-related benefits). A more prosperous society is likely to be healthier.

This report estimates the impact on earnings of attending HE compared with not going. The authors detail how this varies by subject and institution of study, as well as how these returns vary by gender, prior educational attainment and the sorts of subjects individuals have studied up to age 18. The report makes use of the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, which links together tax, benefit, higher education and school records to provide a rich description of individuals’ trajectories through the education system and into the labour market.

Pupils benefit from a large amount of state funding for education in the 12+ years they spend in formal education, about £73,000 on average for pupils aged 16 in Summer 2010 in England. The total amount they experience is shaped by their education choices (e.g. whether to stay on post 16 and/or go to higher education) and the nature of the funding system for each stage of education. In the 1980s, considerably more was spent on the education of those from well-off backgrounds than on those from poorer backgrounds. This was driven by the fact that poorer children were much less likely to stay in education beyond 16, let alone go to university. And funding for higher education (HE) was relatively high. In this report, we find that these differences in funding by social class have now vanished.

Response of the IFS Tax Law Review Committee to the HMRC consultation: Amending HMRC’s Civil Information Powers published in July 2018 (“the Consultation”)

The IFS Green Budget 2018, in association with Citi, ICAEW and the Nuffield Foundation, is edited by Carl Emmerson, Christine Farquharson and Paul Johnson, and copy-edited by Judith Payne. The report looks at the issues and challenges facing Chancellor Philip Hammond as he prepares for his Budget later in October.

This report describes analyses of data that have been collected in all waves of ELSA, particularly the eighth and most recent that took place in 2016–17. In wave 8, data collection included a standard face-to-face interview and a self-completion questionnaire, both of which have been used in previous waves of the study, together with a nurse visit to collect biological measures on half the sample.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is responsible for setting the overall direction for social care policy and funding in England. Recently DHSC has developed in-house modelling capacity to examine likely implications of possible reforms to the system for funding social care. This departs from the process used by the Dilnot Commission on the Funding of Care and Support, where modelling of the implications of the proposed reforms was commissioned from the Public Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the University of Kent and the London School of Economics.

There is a large gender gap in the likelihood of taking maths and physics at A-level, even among high-achieving pupils. Among pupils who achieved grade A or A* (equivalent to grades 7-9) in GCSE maths in 2010, 36.5% of girls compared to 51.1% of boys took maths A-level. Among those who achieved grade A or A* in GCSE physics, just 13.2% of girls compared to 39.3% of boys took physics A-level. By contrast, there is almost no gender gap in the likelihood of taking chemistry A-level amongst those who score highly in the subject at GCSE, and girls are actually more likely to take biology A-level than boys.

English local government finance is part way through a series of major changes that will see its focus shift from being based on redistribution according to spending needs, towards more emphasis on providing financial incentives to tackle needs and increase local revenue-raising capacity. In this context, the government is undertaking a ‘Fair Funding Review’. This is aimed at designing a new system for allocating funding between councils.

English local government finance is part way through a series of major changes that will see its focus shift from being based on redistribution according to spending needs, towards more emphasis on providing financial incentives to tackle needs and boost local revenue-raising capacity. However, that does not mean that redistribution will cease to play any role in the local government finance system: abolishing it completely would see very large variations in different councils’ ability to fund local services.

The National Infrastructure Commission commissioned a team of academics and researchers at the IFS and UCL to create a software tool that estimates how land values respond to changes in land purpose or infrastructure improvements. The tool is now available online, and this page provides some background on, and documentation for, the project.

The last 25 years have seen two periods of public expenditure restraint in the UK (the 1990s and the 2010s) and one period of increased spending (between 2000 and 2010). Over that whole time, the Treasury has been responsible for controlling government spending, setting fiscal rules and the overall control framework, and ensuring that other departments stay within their spending limits. In this report, we use data on spending plans and out-turns to see what they can tell us about the efficacy of spending control under different regimes.

We study the effects of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the market for small business lines of credit.

To mark the BBC’s coverage of the NHS’s 70th birthday in July 2018, researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Health Foundation, The King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust have come together for the first time, using combined expertise to shed light on some of the big questions on the NHS.

This report examines changes in the distribution of household incomes in the UK, and the determinants and consequences of recent trends. This includes analysing changes not only in average living standards but also in household income inequality and measures of income poverty and deprivation.

A response to the consultation from the Finance Committee of the National Assembly for Wales concerning preparations for replacing European Union funding for Wales

Analysis of how council spending on adult social care and other services changed between 2009-10 and 2017-18.