Peter Levell gave a public talk on the topic of "What's the price of free trade?" at the University of Manchester on 23/03/18 to an audience of over 200 people.
Consider a simple general equilibrium economy with one representative consumer, a single competitive firm and the government. Suppose that the government has to finance public expenditures using linear consumption taxes and/or a lump-sum tax on profits redistributed to the consumer. We show that, if the tax rate on profits cannot exceed 100 percent, one cannot improve upon the second-best optimum of an economy with constant returns to scale by using a less efficient profit-generating decreasing returns to scale technology.
This paper investigates individuals' expectations about their own survival to older ages and compares patterns in average responses about survival chances with actual and projected survival rates.
For the new 2018–19 tax year, the Scottish higher-rate threshold has fallen further behind that in the UK, and two new income tax bands have been added in Scotland while the higher- and additional-rates have been increased. While most Scots will be either unaffected or pay slightly less in tax, overall the change will raise revenue as a result of higher earners paying more. This observation argues that while these changes represent small tweaks to the system rather than a major overhaul, differences between the Scottish and UK income tax systems could have significant implications for taxpayer behaviour going forward.
An anti-obesity drive is about to see a tax introduced on sugary drinks across the UK, while Scotland is set to impose a minimum price on alcohol to target problem drinking. But does making unhealthy products more expensive persuade people to make "better" choices? And what are the trade-offs associated with doing so?
From tomorrow, a large proportion of private sector employees will pay more into their pensions – and their employers will have to contribute more too. This is the first of two planned steps in the next two years that will increase the minimum contributions that most employees and their employers will, by default, make to a workplace pension. This is all part of the government’s automatic enrolment policy aimed at increasing retirement saving.
Towards the end of last month, the Department for Work and Pensions published the latest version of Households Below Average Income. Not a publication with a title to set the pulse racing, perhaps, but the most thorough analysis we have of what has been happening to household incomes and inequality. This version brings the story up to the end of the 2016-17 financial year.
Eligibility for a free lunch was recently extended to all state school children in England and Scotland who are in Year 2 or below (i.e. up to age 6 or 7). For all other state school pupils in the UK, eligibility remains restricted by a means test so that free school meals (FSMs) go to a relatively narrow set of children in poor households. Around 1 million children currently receive means-tested FSMs: equivalent to 15% of those who are not entitled to universal FSMs. We estimate that around two-thirds of those children are in the lowest-income fifth of households with children.
We present a dynamic lifecycle model of women’s choices with respect to partnership status, labour supply and fertility when a male partner’s true tendency for abusive behaviour is unobserved.
Organisations with 250 or more employees now have to provide statistics relating to the gender wage gap. The data that are available so far show the vast majority paying men, on average, more than women. The gender wage gap has barely fallen over the last fifteen years and greater understanding of its determinants are needed. The new data being provided by employers could help contribute to that. As ever, however, the statistics are limited and need to be interpreted with care.
The emergency department (ED) is a complex node of healthcare delivery that is facing market and regulatory pressure across developed economies to reduce wait times. In this paper we study how ED doctors respond to such incentives, by focusing on a landmark policy in England that imposed strong incentives to treat ED patients within four hours.
