We study the effectiveness of a community-level information intervention aimed at reducing open defecation (OD) and increasing sanitation investments in Nigeria. The results of a cluster-randomized control trial conducted in 247 communities between 2014 and 2018 suggest that average impacts are exiguous.
The tax and benefit system is a key tool for a government trying to reduce inequality. In this briefing note, we examine the effects that cash benefits and taxes had on UK inequality in 2016–17.
A substantial body of research on the UK’s National Minimum Wage (NMW) has concluded that the the NMW has not had a detrimental effect on employment. This research has directly influenced, through the Low Pay Commission, the conduct of policy, including the subsequent introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW).
This research explored the prevalence of gifting in the general population and how it varied between different groups, based on a new quantitative survey was conducted with a representative sample of adults in Great Britain. The survey also explored the nature of gifting – including the number and value of gifts given, who they were given to, and the motivations for doing so – as well as awareness of inheritance tax rules and exemptions.
This month marks six years since councils were given responsibility for designing schemes that help low-income working-age households to pay their council tax, at the same time as central government funding for it was cut. In recently published research, we look at how schemes have changed, and with what effects.
In this research we investigate who wins and loses from universal credit, and by how much. For the first time, we also look at the effects of universal credit on people’s incomes over eight years of their lives, rather than just at a point in time. This lets us look at the impact on those that are persistently, rather than temporarily, low income.
We analyse a simple Hotelling model in which retailers and manufacturers endogenously advertise their respective brands; we account for the impact of advertising on retailer–manufacturer bargaining and downstream competition. The model predicts that retailers advertise their store brands less when advertising is more rivalrous.
This Saturday (6 April 2019) marks the start of a new tax year. Unlike many other countries, the UK routinely – and sensibly – uprates the cash values of most tax thresholds and benefit rates each year in line with inflation, in order to maintain their real value.
We add to the debate by examining the robustness of racial/ethnic sentencing gaps, by gender, when allowing for selection on unobservables. We do so in the context of federal criminal cases, considering 250,000 cases, and using a dataset containing a rich set of covariates relating to defendant and legal characteristics of cases.
Women work for less productive, lower-paying firms than men, our new analysis suggests - which may contribute to the gender pay gap. This difference between the kinds of firms that men and women work for opens up around the time women have children, when many switch to part-time work or start working closer to home.
