English local government finance is part way through a series of major changes that will see its focus shift from being based on redistribution according to spending needs, towards more emphasis on providing financial incentives to tackle needs and boost local revenue-raising capacity. However, that does not mean that redistribution will cease to play any role in the local government finance system: abolishing it completely would see very large variations in different councils’ ability to fund local services.
In a new CSAE working paper, IFS researcher Dr Rachel Cassidy uses a randomised controlled trial to examine the link between intra-household bargaining and use of new contraceptive technologies in Mozambique.
Do households value access to free health insurance when making labor supply decisions? We answer this question using the introduction of universal health insurance in Mexico, the Seguro Popular (SP), in 2002.
A “patent box” is a term for the application of a lower corporate tax rate to the income derived from the ownership of patents. This tax subsidy instrument has been introduced in a number of countries since 2000. Using comprehensive data on patent filings at the European Patent Office, including information on ownership transfers pre‐ and post‐grant, we investigate the impact of the introduction of a patent box on international patent transfers, on the choice of ownership location, and on invention in the relevant country.
The last 25 years have seen two periods of public expenditure restraint in the UK (the 1990s and the 2010s) and one period of increased spending (between 2000 and 2010). Over that whole time, the Treasury has been responsible for controlling government spending, setting fiscal rules and the overall control framework, and ensuring that other departments stay within their spending limits. In this report, we use data on spending plans and out-turns to see what they can tell us about the efficacy of spending control under different regimes.
A presentation by Luke Sibieta, IFS Research Fellow, to the Wales Public Services 2025 conference, ‘Sustaining Wales public services: austerity and beyond’, 12 July 2018.
We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to signi cant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline.
