Reports

This paper was presented at a seminar organised by the Economic and Social Research Council. It asks whether it is possible to design a pension system that can guarantee financial security to individuals, employers and to the state simultaneously.

This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States.

This is the baseline evaluation report of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer programme.

We compare the importance of occupational gender segregation for the gender wage gap in East and West Germany in 1995 using a sample of social-security wage records for full-time workers.

On 16th February Oliver Letwin, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined the Conservative Party's preliminary public spending proposals in the form of a "Medium Term Expenditure Strategy". We summarise and analyse the key points in this briefing note.

How and why has the way in which the average British family spends its money changed over the past 25 years? Those are the key questions examined in this report, using data from the UK FES between 1975 and 1999. It looks not only at broad changes in total spending, but also at how the division of expenditure between basics and non-basics and between durable goods, non-durable goods and services has altered over time.

This Commentary presents a detailed analysis of the latest figures and recent trends.

Evidence that cash flow has a significant effect on company investment spending, after controlling for Tobin's average Q, has often been interpreted as suggesting the importance of financing constraints.

This is the third report of the longitudinal quantitative evaluation of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) pilots and the first since the government announced that EMA is to be rolled out nationally from 2004.

The IFS Green Budget examines the Chancellor's options for the Budget 2004.

The Government's plans for reforming Higher Education (HE) funding have been a source of great controversy. Much of this controversy has been focused on what the reforms will mean for students from different family income backgrounds, and on the levels of debt they may need to incur to go to higher education. Concern has also been raised about how graduates will be affected by these debt repayments throughout their working lives, as well as whether or not the funds raised will improve the situation of universities significantly. This Briefing Note addresses these issues, as well as describing the evolution of the proposed reforms to Higher Education funding in recent months. In doing this, we set out and explain the system which is most likely to be implemented if the HE Bill is passed, and discuss the ways in which students, graduates, and universities are likely to be affected. We also consider the possible effects on the taxpayer.

This note outlines the preliminary findings of the evaluation of a welfare programme in Colombia, Familias en Accíon. The programme aims to foster nutritional and educational development for the children of poor families in rural and urban communities, and the evaluation will use data collected from treatment and control areas to discover what methods are effective and how they work. In this note, we describe what the data show about the population and what the preliminary findings indicate about the efficacy of the programme.

This paper summarises the economic literature on modelling take-up, with a focus on income-related or work-related benefits or tax credits.

this paper uses a structural model of labour supply and programme participation to show the impact of a reform to in-work support (Working Families Tax Credit) on both labour supply and programme participation (or take-up).

This Briefing Note provides an overview of public spending in the UK. It describes the components of public spending and examines trends in expenditure.