We look at the likely costs of the government's promised improvements to public services and its target to end child poverty within a generation.
1 July 2002
27 June 2002
17 June 2002
The paper discusses the properties of a rule for adjusting scores in limited overs cricket matches to preserve probabilities of victory across interruptions by rain.
16 June 2002
I study a simple, widely applicable approach to handling the initial conditions problem in dynamic, nonlinear unobserved effects models.
13 June 2002
10 June 2002
This paper argues that after five years of the current Labour government, consistent trends in social security policy have emerged
3 June 2002
This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries.
2 June 2002
In this note, the authors examine how we might measure the fiscal stance in terms of the scale of the public deficit. They show the path the gap between state income and expenditure has taken since 1946. The paper also tries to isolate the effects of government policy as opposed to the economic cycle.
2 June 2002
Should local authorities be free to determine their expenditure, provided they finance changes in spending by changes in local taxation?
1 June 2002
This paper explains and evaluates this new fiscal measure. It concludes that, given the present fiscal policy of the Australian government, fiscal balance is a superior fiscal policy measure to the 'cash' budget balance measure which it replaced.
1 June 2002
The paper looks at the effects of changing fuel tariffs on low-income households
1 June 2002
The paper presents two taxonomies for classifying global and transnational health-promoting activities according to three parameters of publicness -non-rivalry of benefits, non-excludability of non-payers and the aggregation technologies.
1 June 2002
The impact of response measurement error in duration data is investigated using small parameter asymptotic approximations and compared with the effect of hazard function heterogeneity.
1 June 2002
This paper uses a unique data opportunity provided by the British Household Panel Survey to systematically investigate the impact of recall on measured labour market behaviour and to highlight how and to what degree the biases in the reported data may affect the estimation of models of labour market dynamics.
1 June 2002
In this commentary, the authors examine the effect of stamp duty on the stock market, on business investment and on merger and acquisition activity. They consider possible threats to the long-run sustainability of stamp duty revenues. The commentary goes on to assess the potential revenue implications of abolition for the government and to examine various means by which the revenues could be recouped. Each of these involves its own potential economic distortions and possible additional administrative costs.
1 June 2002
This note traces the trends in public spending and taxation in the UK during the twentieth century.
1 June 2002
The main measure of inflation in the UK is the retail price index (RPI). One way to think of the RPI is as a measure of the changing cost of buying a very large shopping basket containing all of the purchases of a typical UK household. There is, of course, no such thing as a typical household. As a result, inflation varies across the household population, and it would be remarkable if the RPI were a good measure of inflation for every household. This IFS commentary explores the issues surrounding the extent and the implications of differences in inflation rates between households.
1 June 2002
This paper examines the choice of pension scheme and job mobility in Britain.
30 May 2002