Reports

This briefing note, prepared for the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, documents the estimated distributional impact of the tax and benefit changes that have been announced for implementation in the current parliament. It then considers the extent to which households might expect the net losses from these changes to be offset through increased wages as a result of the large increase in the minimum wage for those aged 25 and over that was announced in the July 2015 Budget.

This is a response by David Phillips, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author only. The IFS has no corporate views.

The last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in pensioner incomes and decline in pensioner poverty rates. But what are the prospects for the future? This Round-Up, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, draws together the key findings from a programme of work led by the IFS which looked at the prospects for future pensioner living standards.

This report, written in collaboration with Indepth Precision Consulting, Nigeria, presents a detailed description of the baseline data collected as part of the Formal Research Component of WaterAid UK's Project “Sustainable Total Sanitation Nigeria -implementation, learning, research, and influence on practice and policy" (STS Nigeria), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This briefing note analyses the higher education funding reforms announced by the Chancellor in the Summer Budget 2015.

This report analyses government statistics about the distribution of income in the UK (Households Below Average Incomes or HBAI).

This paper examines – for two developing countries, Vietnam and Peru – whether disadvantaged children learn less than advantaged children when both types of children are enrolled in the same school. The paper examines six different definitions of advantage, based on household wealth, cognitive skills at age 5, gender, ethnicity (Peru only), maternal education, and nutritional status.

Researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) are working on a number of sanitation evaluation studies, two of them in India (in the states of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu) and one in Nigeria (in Enugu and Ekiti). In this short review the authors discuss the types of sanitation interventions that will be evaluated in the context of these studies.

In this note, the authors provide evidence indicating that extended families are important in this context, before demonstrating that it is vital to understand their effects on household well-being, and that there is a role for government intervention. The authors further summarise work undertaken by EDePo that shows the need to incorporate the extended family in order to design effective policies and interventions.

This research summary provides a nuanced review of recent analysis of the impact of microfinance.

This working paper was published in February 2014 by the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford. In the paper, Manski's (1993) standard linear-in-means model is used to estimate endogenous peer effects on the awareness of vulnerable groups on Tanzania Social Action Fund II (TASAFII), i.e. Tanzania's flagship community-driven development programme.

Existing evidence suggests that extra grant revenues lead to little improvements in public services in developing countries - but would governments spend tax revenues differently? This paper considers a program that invests in the tax capacity of Brazilian municipalities.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation - including education, and savings for women in the UK, exploiting policy changes. This was first published as an NBER working paper in March 2015.

This technical report focuses on ELSA's methodology and the conduct of wave 5.

This technical report focuses on ELSA's methodology and the conduct of wave 6

There were large cuts to the public workforce over the last parliament during a period of fiscal consolidation. The pace of public workforce cuts is likely to accelerate over the new parliament. This Briefing Note, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), looks at the movement between jobs, or ‘mobility’, of workers in the public and private sectors. It sets out the extent to which reductions in the public workforce to date have been delivered by freezing recruitment of new workers and not replacing workers who move to non-employment, and through more workers moving from the public sector to the private sector than moving in the other direction.

This report analyses the impact of abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) in 2011. We show that this reduced Year 12 participation by around 1.5 percentage points.

We construct a tractable structural dynamic model of consumption, purchase and stocks by consumers for whom stockpiling is unobserved and for whom preferences are isolastic and affected by independent and identically distributed shocks.

IFS researchers wrote one part of this report, prepared for the European Commission by a consortium of researchers led by IHS Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna.

This comment piece, published by the Center for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies (CeRP), explains the recent legislative changes concerning defined contribution pensions and explores the possible effects of these changes.