Poverty

We find that parental cognitive ability is a significant predictor of children's cognitive ability; moreover, it explains one sixth of the socio-economic gap in those skills, even after controlling for a rich set of demographic, attitudinal and behavioural factors.

This note provides details on the average losses among pensioner households from tax and benefit reforms that will be introduced between January 2011 and April 2014.

This Briefing Note provides projections of income poverty among children and working-age adults in the UK under current tax and benefit policies.

Immediately following the Spending Review of 20th October, the IFS updated its analysis of the distributional impact of tax and benefit reforms to be introduced between 2010-11 and 2014-15, taking into account the effects of the reforms announced in the Spending Review.2 This did not substantially alter the conclusions from previous analysis by IFS researchers that the impact of the tax and benefit reforms to be introduced over this period was decreasing as a proportion of income within the lowest 90% of households in the income distribution, although it is the very richest households that will lose the most overall. If we were instead to rank households by expenditure, which as we have argued previously might better reflect households' lifetime incomes, losses as a proportion of expenditure again fall as we move up the expenditure distribution

In this paper we look at how the tax and benefit system redistributed income and affected incentives to work in 2009-10, and at the effect of tax and benefit reforms between 1978-79 and 2009-10 on the level of inequality and work incentives.

IFS analysis shows that the coalition Government's tax increases and welfare cuts are hitting Londoners harder, on average, than households across the UK as a whole.

In July 2010, the Department for Education launched a consultation on school funding arrangements in 2011-12, and their plans for a pupil premium from September 2011 onwards. This briefing note contains the response of IFS researchers to this consultation.

Current and future governments are committed to reducing the rate of relative income child poverty in the UK to 10% by 2020-21. This paper looks in detail at the progress made towards this goal under the previous Labour administrations.

This paper tests whether family size has a causal effect on girls' education in Mexico.

We examine the effect of large cash transfers on the consumption of food by poor households in rural Mexico.

We find a very strong correlation between cognitive ability across generations, as well as a strong relationship between family socio-economic status and cognitive ability.