Debates about welfare policy often discuss benefit recipients as though they are a fixed, relatively small group of people. In reality, people’s circumstances fluctuate frequently over their lifetimes, often dramatically and in ways that matter hugely for entitlements to benefits. People’s health changes, they move in and out of work, their earnings vary, and children come and go. In new research, IFS researchers use data which tracks the same individuals over long periods of time to provide a longer-run perspective on people’s interactions with the benefits system.
Recent years have seen big changes to the local government finance system. These include the ending of annual spending needs assessments and the introduction of the business rates retention scheme (BRRS) in 2013–14.
A new IFS report funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that one important factor in the gender wage gap is that mothers spend less time in paid work, and more time working part time, than do fathers, and as a result, they miss out on earnings growth associated with more experience.
The falls in the proportion of young adults owning their own home have been documented in previous work. In this briefing note, we provide up-to-date analysis of these falls in homeownership, and which groups of young adults have seen the sharpest falls.
The combination of credit constraints and indivisible consumption goods may induce some risk-averse individuals to gamble to have a chance of crossing a purchasing threshold.
We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task.
The Hamilton method for estimating CPI bias is simple, intuitive, and has been widely adopted. We show that the method conflates CPI bias with variation in cost-of-living across income levels.
