The prime function of the tax system is to raise revenue. On that measure the current tax system looks in many ways remarkably similar to that in place 40 years ago in the late 1970s. In the current tax year, the UK government expects to raise 15% of national income from taxes on personal income, 10% from indirect taxes, and 2% from corporation taxes, little different from what it did in 1978-79.
Other effects though are quite different. If the tax system’s first job is to raise revenue, its second – alongside the benefit system – is to undertake redistribution in a way which minimises economic costs and disincentives. On these measures the UK tax and benefit system has undergone a dramatic transformation, leaving it almost unrecognisable from that in place 40 years ago, let alone from when the first edition of Tolley’s Income Tax was launched in 1916.
This chapter explores the consequences of just a few of these changes for how the tax and benefit system redistributes resources, and the incentive individuals face to increase their earnings
Maternity units in England operate at 100% capacity much of the time. When capacity is breached, units may occasionally have to close temporarily to new admissions, causing stress to women in labour and undermining their choice over where to have their babies. New work by IFS unpicks some of the causes of closures.
This briefing note reviews the evidence on the long-run pressures faced by maternity units from changes in the number of maternity admissions and the case mix.
In this paper we analyze the role of expected labor and marriage market returns as determinants of the college enrollment decisions of Mexican high school graduates. Moreover, we investigate whether the (relative) weights of these factors differ by gender. We use data on individuals’ expectations regarding future labor market outcomes which we directly elicited from the youths, and two different measures of marriage market returns. First, marriage market returns are proxied by the (net-)supply of potential partners in the youths’ local marriage markets. Second, we use data which elicits youths’ beliefs about their future spouse's earnings conditional on their own education level. We find that labor market as well as marriage market returns are important determinants of the college enrollment decision. However, boys’ and girls’ preferences differ in terms of the relative role of the two determinants, in that the relative weight of labor market versus marriage market returns is larger for boys than for girls.
In this paper we use high quality data from two developing countries, Ethiopia and Peru, to estimate the production functions of human capital from age 1 to age 15.
We use the best available longitudinal data set, the Health and Retirement Study, and a battery of causal inference methods to provide both central estimates and bounds for the long-term effect of health insurance on health and mortality among the near-elderly (initial age 50–61) over a 20-year period.
