Reports

Corporate tax has rarely received as much attention as in recent years. The coalition government has enacted a series of policy changes – the most prominent being an 8 percentage point cut in the main rate – with an explicit aim of increasing the competitiveness of the UK’s corporate tax system. In this election briefing note, we review the policy changes since 2010 and assess where this leaves the UK regime in an international context.

This briefing note looks at changes in the cost of housing for different groups, before looking at changes in housing circumstances, with a focus on tenure and dwelling size, and exploring the policy challenges that these trends present.

This briefing note examines the Right to Buy policy in the United Kingdom, by which council tenants could buy their council properties at a discounted price, and the subsequent extension of the policy to most forms of social housing.

The report analyses the issues and challenges facing Chancellor George Osborne as he prepares for his final Budget of this parliament.

The coalition government has implemented changes to the benefit system that mean spending in 2015–16 will be £16.7 billion (7%) lower than it would otherwise have been. Real terms benefit spending, however, is forecast to be almost exactly the same in 2015–16 as it was in 2010–11, at £220 billion. This reflects the effect of underlying economic and demographic factors which are pushing up spending – most importantly an ageing population, but also weak wage growth and rising private rents.

The coalition government has introduced a large number of tax and benefit changes during its five years in office. Here we examine the effect of all these changes on households' disposable incomes.

This paper was presented at a workshop on 'Expenditure-based consolidation: experiences and outcomes' organised by the European Commission Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) in Brussels on 20 January 2015.

The UK Statistics Authority published the independent review of UK consumer prices statistics led by Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on 8 January 2015. The full report and an executive summary are available via the links on the right-hand side of this page. Further information is also available in a news release also published on 8 January 2015.

In this paper we look at whether conditions in early life can have persistent influence on the development of personality traits, as has been shown to be the case for health and cognitive skills. We find strong and robust evidence of persistent impacts among siblings of early life rainfall fluctuations on measures of latent personality trait, known as core self-evaluation, in adulthood.

This election briefing note describes the government’s fiscal targets and the three main parties’ proposed fiscal stances.

In this briefing note we analyse the Smith Commission's published proposals.

Early childhood is a period of rapid growth and development, which lays the foundations for later life, but it is also a period in which children are at their most vulnerable. Poverty, poor nutrition and under-stimulating and unhygienic surroundings, which affect millions of children in developing countries, hamper and stifle child health and development.

This paper considers the development of HMRC’s discretionary powers and the limits applied by the courts on the use of those powers with particular reference to the legitimate expectation rule.

This paper considers what the OTS has achieved to date and what can be learnt about the impact of the OTS on simplification of the tax system.

This briefing note updates previous IFS projections of how these poverty measures are likely to evolve in Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole between 2013–14 and 2020–21, taking into account recent policy announcements and revisions to macroeconomic forecasts

This report examines trends in the organisation of general practitioner (GP) practices in England between 2004 and 2010, and the relationship between practice size and two indicators of the quality of care: Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) scores; emergency inpatient admissions for ambulatory care sensitive (ACS) conditions. We also examine the relationship between practice size and outpatient referral behaviour.

This briefing provides an overview of the evolution of the British benefits system over the last half-century, describing both long-run trends and more recent changes.

This briefing note focuses on the important question of how devolved taxes should interact with the block grant and the Barnett formula.

This report provides the first evidence of the relative cost-effectiveness of different routes into teaching in England, describing and empirically estimating the costs and benefits of different routes into teaching while accounting, as far as possible, for the selection of teachers with different characteristics into each route.

This research looks at trends in poverty (relative and absolute) after taking into account households’ different experiences of inflation.