Employment

We study a general model of occupational choice and optimal income taxation where agents have private cost of work that differ across occupations and have both deterministic and random components. We apply our framework to study the work decisions of couples in an extensive set up and give necessary and sufficient conditions under which joint-working households should be subsidized compared to single-worker households.

IFS Election 2017 analysis is being produced with funding from the Nuffield Foundation as part of its work to ensure public debate in the run-up to the General Election is informed by independent and rigorous evidence.

In this paper we use high quality data from two developing countries, Ethiopia and Peru, to estimate the production functions of human capital from age 1 to age 15.

35 Years of Reforms: a panel analysis of the incidence of, and employee and employer responses to, social security contributions in the UK

Tax in a changing world of work

We evaluate the long-term impacts of a randomized Colombian training and job placement program.

We study how women’s choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty.

Holy cows or cash cows? The economic return to livestock in rural India

Two decades of income inequality in Britain: the role of wages, household earnings and redistribution

We begin with a description of some basic patterns found in the data. As in Moscarini and Postel-Vinay (2016) we draw our data from the SIPP 1996-2008 panels, covering 1996-2013 with few gaps. To refine the measurement of EE transitions, we adopt the methodology and results from Fujita, Moscarini and Postel-Vinay (2017).

In this briefing note, we examine police officer retention in some detail.

In China, the employment rate among middle-aged and older urban residents is exceptionally low. This paper investigates potential explanations of this low level of employment in urban China.

Relationship between employment histories and frailty trajectories in later life: evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Many governments are considering expanding childcare subsidies, but little is known about the impact of such policies on parent’s labour supply. Exploiting free childcare eligibility rules based on date of birth in a difference-in-differences framework, we compare the effects of offering free part-time childcare and of expanding this offer to the whole school day. Free part-time childcare only affects the labour force participation of mothers whose youngest child is eligible. Expanding from part-time to full-time free childcare leads to significant increases in labour force participation and employment of these mothers, which emerge immediately and grow over the months following entitlement.

In this new work, the researchers compared what happened to the labour market outcomes of mothers and fathers as their children moved from being entitled to a free part-time nursery place (offering 15 hours of free childcare per week) to a full-time place at primary school (which effectively offers parents 30–35 hours of free childcare per week).

The success of universal preschool education depends crucially on the policy parameters and specific country context.

More work is needed to distinguish precautionary saving motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests. In this paper, progress toward disentangling these motivations has been made by matching other features of the data, such as public and private insurance choices.