This paper examines the equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation. We build an overlapping generations life cycle model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving decisions.
In April, the Vancouver School is Economics hosted a free public lecture, The Accumulation of Human Capital: Research and Policy Questions, presented by Professor Orazio Attanasio of the University College London.
This presentation was given by Stuart Adam at the CIOT/IFS debate, "Taxing families - 30 years after the introduction of independent taxation have we got it right?", on 26 June 2018.
It is now just over two years since the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. Since then, it is fair to say that there has been a confusing barrage of apparently contradictory claims about the state of the economy.
Between 2011 and 2016, he lowest earners saw rises of more than 10 per cent in their earnings over that period, while middle earners had increases of only 4 per cent. Top earners got nothing at all.
To mark the BBC’s coverage of the NHS’s 70th birthday in July 2018, researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Health Foundation, The King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust have come together for the first time, using combined expertise to shed light on some of the big questions on the NHS.
In this chapter, we analyse how living standards differ between those with and without long-standing health problems. There are many ways in which health and living standards may interact. First, poor health may reduce an individual’s living standards as they have to spend more money on goods or services to mitigate the impact of their health condition. Second, poor health may restrict the amount of paid work that an individual may do (if they can do any at all), or restrict the type of work that they can do, reducing their earnings. Third, being on a low income may itself worsen certain health problems. Fourth, poor health and low incomes might both be caused by similar factors, such as low educational qualifications. Fifth, being unwell may directly reduce someone’s living standards in a broad sense, even if it does not affect their material standard of living. For all of these reasons, one might expect the living standards of those in poor health to be lower than those of the general population.
At this event, IFS researchers presented the key findings from the latest in the series of flagship IFS annual reports on living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the report analyses living standards in the UK up to and including the latest year of data for 2016-17, while setting this in the context of the very latest developments in pay, employment and inflation.
The Prime Minister has committed to spending increases for the NHS over the next five years and promised this would be at least partly funded by a ‘Brexit dividend’. This is not the first time that NHS spending increases have been linked to the UK’s exit from the EU – the now infamous £350 million per week pledge was a significant feature of the 2016 referendum campaign.
An article by IFS authors was the most downloaded in the journal Economica for 2017. The article, 'Two Decades of Income Inequality in Britain: The Role of Wages, Household Earnings & Redistribution', by Chris Belfield, Richard Blundell, Jonthan Cribb, Andrew Hood, and Robert Joyce was published...
There is a current debate about whether the definition of self-employment should be aligned across tax and employment law. At present there is a rather complex situation – illustrated by a recent court case involving Pimlico Plumbers – in which an individual can be deemed a worker in employment law but self-employed in tax law. The definitions matter because they determine who gets access to employment rights and who gets preferential tax treatment.
