Reports

This report reviews and appraises the Fiscal Framework Agreement, with a particular focus on this issue of block grant adjustment.

Official data on the distribution of household incomes in the UK are available only with a significant lag: the latest statistics are for 2013–14. In this report, we use modelling techniques to provide a more up-to-date picture and to assess how things are likely to evolve in the coming years.

The negotiations around adjustments to Scotland's block grant have been the subject of months of negotiations between the Scottish and UK governments.

This is a response by IFS researchers to the Work and Pensions Committee's intergenerational fairness inquiry.

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.

The IFS Green Budget 2016 was published on 8 February.

This paper uses comparable data from the U.S. and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of assets among households age 70 and older.

The effect of increasing school resources on educational outcomes is a central issue inthe debate on improving school quality.

The Scotland Bill, currently making its way through the Houses of Parliament, will transfer a range of tax and spending powers from Westminster to the

This is a response by IFS researchers to the UK Government's consultation 'Pay to Stay: Fairer Rents in Social Housing'.

This report examines the impact of the changes to the tax and benefit system to be introduced by the UK Government between April 2015 and April 2019 in Wales and compare this to average impacts across the whole UK.

In this report, as well as showing the direct impact of tax and benefit changes on household incomes and work incentives, the author analyses the distributional impact of the gains from the 'National Living Wage' (NLW), the impact of the NLW on the work incentives faced by those whose wages are currently below the level of the NLW, and how the introduction of the NLW affects the work incentives of those currently not in paid work to take a job at the minimum wage.

In this report, the authors aim to improve understanding of wealth holdings of individual households considerably using new data from the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS).

Spending on the police in England and Wales was cut by 14% in real terms between 2010–11 and 2014–15. This briefing note, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, places these spending cuts in the context of the large spending increases over the 2000s, and explores the differences between police forces in how they fared over these two periods.

This report uses linked individual-level administrative data from schools in England and universities in the UK to document the relationships between socio-economic status, ethnicity and HE participation, and explore what drives these relationships.

This briefing note provides an overview of the social housing system. Except where stated otherwise, it focuses on the system in operation in England: many of the institutional and policy details differ in the other nations of the UK, and a full treatment of those is beyond the scope of this survey. However, some of the basic facts about social housing can be provided at a Great Britain or UK level, and we do that where possible (making clear the distinction).

Social housing providers (local authorities and housing associations) fulfill at least three functions: building housing, acting as landlord and delivering subsidised rent levels. This report focuses on the last of these. Specifically, we analyse the consequences for tenants, social housing providers and the exchequer of changing the level of rent charged to tenants in social housing. We do not take a view as to what level is appropriate, or look at wider policy issues in the social housing system.

This Thinkpiece on pensions taxation was published by The Chartered Insurance Institute on 21 October 2015.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a public consultation regarding the proposal on 22 July 2015. This short note was submitted to the consultation and extends the work of Briefing Note 174 (Britton, Crawford and Dearden, 2015), analysing the likely implications of the proposed changes for students entering university in 2016-17.

On 25th November the government will announce the results of its 2015 Spending Review, allocating spending between government departments for the four years 2016-17 to 2019-20. This background briefing note sets out the constraints facing the Chancellor, given the plans for the public finances that he published in the July Budget.