Taxes and benefits

TAXBEN is the IFS’s tax and benefit microsimulation model, which calculates the impact of tax and benefit policy on households. It is used heavily in IFS’s work on the impacts of tax and benefit policy. This document gives a high level summary of TAXBEN, covering what policies and effects it does and does not include, and its limitations.

In this report, we seek to understand why past recessions have had such different effects on income inequality. We also examine the potential impact of the next labour market downturn on the distribution of household incomes.

Unemployment insurance programs in most Western countries follow a common design. The benefits are set at a constant replacement rate for a fixed period, typically followed by lower benefits under unemployment assistance. In such systems, the hazard rate from unemployment typically declines from an initial peak the longer workers are unemployed, surges at unemployment exhaustion, and declines thereafter.

We study household income inequality in both Great Britain and the United States and the interplay between labour market earnings and the tax system.

The key backdrop to all fiscal events in the UK since the financial crisis has been the weak performance of the economy. At the time of the March 2017 Budget, national income per adult was around 15% lower than it would have been had output per adult instead grown by 2% a year (close to the post-war average) since the start of 2008. Despite this historically poor performance, weak growth was forecast to continue. The March forecast implied that, by 2022, national income per capita would be 18% lower than it would have been if it had grown at 2% per year since 2008. That is astonishing.

Understanding tax non-compliance and the effectiveness of strategies to tackle it is crucial for a modern tax authority. In this paper we study how and why audits impact reported tax in the years after audit - the dynamic effect - for individual income taxpayers.

This briefing note presents preliminary results from a study on value added tax (VAT) and tax compliance in the Indian state of West Bengal.

This briefing note summarises new research on which types of people under-report the taxes they owe, and what effects audits have on government revenue.

In this paper, we examine the causal effect of the Winter Fuel Payment on health outcomes, including self-reports of chest infection, measured hypertension and biomarkers of infection and inflammation.

In this paper we discuss a number of issues in linking measures of the scale of a disaster to the aid response, particularly taking account of outliers in both scale of disaster and aid.

Mobility and the lifetime distributional impact of tax and transfer reforms

Estimating the responsiveness of top incomes to tax: a summary of three new papers

Estimating the size and nature of responses to changes in income tax rates on top incomes in the UK: a panel analysis*

Frictions and taxpayer responses: evidence from bunching at personal tax thresholds

Updating and critiquing HMRC’s analysis of the UK’s 50% top marginal rate of tax