Labour supply and workforce

We present a dynamic lifecycle model of women’s choices with respect to partnership status, labour supply and fertility when a male partner’s true tendency for abusive behaviour is unobserved.

The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States.

IFS has published research that is relevant to two of the specific questions asked in the inquiry, and that we hope the committee will find helpful

We look at how strongly shocks to asset values affect labour supply, using Italian data.

This paper estimates the effects of entering the labour market when the economy is weak on subsequent living standards using consistent long-running household survey data from the UK.

Overall, high-skilled individuals form an important group of potential migrants because of both their relatively high rates of mobility and their potential contribution to the host economy. Studying migrant selection in this context is particularly useful because these migrants face low formal barriers to migration and are unlikely to be credit constrained. The observed selection patterns underline the relevance of the Roy/Borjas model in this setting.

Exploring industry dynamics and the response to minimum wage hikes.

In this report, we seek to understand why past recessions have had such different effects on income inequality. We also examine the potential impact of the next labour market downturn on the distribution of household incomes.

Unemployment insurance programs in most Western countries follow a common design. The benefits are set at a constant replacement rate for a fixed period, typically followed by lower benefits under unemployment assistance. In such systems, the hazard rate from unemployment typically declines from an initial peak the longer workers are unemployed, surges at unemployment exhaustion, and declines thereafter.

We study household income inequality in both Great Britain and the United States and the interplay between labour market earnings and the tax system.

Since the 1970s, many countries have established free or highly subsidized education for all preschool children in the hope of improving children’s learning and socio-economic life chances and encouraging mothers to join the labor force. Evaluations reveal that these policies can increase maternal employment in the short term and may continue to do so even after the child is no longer in preschool by enabling mothers to gain more job skills and increase their attachment to the labor force. However, their effectiveness depends on the policy design, the country context, and the characteristics of mothers of preschoolers.

Expanding access to pre-school education and childcare services has been a key policy on the agenda of many governments for over 30 years. Several motivations have been at the heart of these policies.

This working paper looks at the impact of health on labor supply near retirement.

Estimating the responsiveness of top incomes to tax: a summary of three new papers

Estimating the size and nature of responses to changes in income tax rates on top incomes in the UK: a panel analysis*

Updating and critiquing HMRC’s analysis of the UK’s 50% top marginal rate of tax

Frictions and taxpayer responses: evidence from bunching at personal tax thresholds

In this paper we analyze the role of expected labor and marriage market returns as determinants of the college enrollment decisions of Mexican high school graduates. Moreover, we investigate whether the (relative) weights of these factors differ by gender. We use data on individuals’ expectations regarding future labor market outcomes which we directly elicited from the youths, and two different measures of marriage market returns. First, marriage market returns are proxied by the (net-)supply of potential partners in the youths’ local marriage markets. Second, we use data which elicits youths’ beliefs about their future spouse's earnings conditional on their own education level. We find that labor market as well as marriage market returns are important determinants of the college enrollment decision. However, boys’ and girls’ preferences differ in terms of the relative role of the two determinants, in that the relative weight of labor market versus marriage market returns is larger for boys than for girls.