We shed light on the issue that ‘deferred’ pensions that people no longer contribute to might provide declining value for money over time if people do not engage with them.
This briefing note compares trends in output, consumer spending and saving from the 2020 recession with those from two previous recessions beginning in 1990 and 2008.
As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, IFS delivered a public economic talk on "Why are pensions important?" aimed at A-level and undergraduate students who have an interest in economics or might want to pursue a career in public policy research.
Earlier this week, markets reacted to comments by the governor of the Bank of England by bringing forward their expectations of when interest rates will rise. What will this mean for different generations?
Dame Angela Eagle MP and leading experts in tax discussed whether the UK should make more use of taxes on wealth. Even if the overall tax take doesn’t rise, should more be raised from wealth for distributional reasons? And, if we are to tax wealth more, should this be achieved by reforming current taxes, such as those on property, capital gains and inheritances?
At this event, IFS researchers presented the key findings from their latest report on "Why do wealthy parents have wealthy children?", funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
This report examines how household incomes were changing in the UK up to the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how other measures of household living standards have changed over the course of the pandemic.
We examine the first nationwide policy in the United Kingdom obliging small employers to enroll employees automatically into a pension. Exploiting pseudorandom variation in its introduction, we find automatic enrollment increased pension participation by 44 percentage points, reaching 70 percent — still substantially lower than the 90 percent.
rate among those working for the largest employers.
In an ongoing programme of research, we aim to examine in detail how pension saving might be expected to change over working life, and how employees and the self-employed behave in practice.
At this event, researchers shared findings from two new reports, examining when individuals should save for retirement – given factors like earnings growth and children – and how employees save in practice.
MPCs were directly elicited from a representative sample of UK adults in July 2020 using receipt of a hypothetical unanticipated, one-time income payment. Reported MPCs are low, around 11% on average.
