Taxes and benefits

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation—including education, and savings for women in the United Kingdom, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy.

The distributional impact of proposed reforms plays a central role in public debates around tax and transfer policy. We show that accounting for realistic patterns of mobility in employment, earnings and household circumstances over the life-cycle greatly affects our assessment of the distributional effects of tax and transfer reforms.

We study extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for tax compliance in the context of a local church tax in Germany.

This paper presents causal evidence on the impact of work search requirements on single parents’ transitions into work and onto other benefits.

The first component of the centre’s work involves partnering with the Governments of Ghana and Ethiopia to co-produce modelling tools and analyses of the key tax and benefit policy and administration issues that these countries face.

This paper provides a comprehensive comparison of the financial incentive to work in Ireland and the UK. It uses closely harmonised tax and benefit microsimulation models for both countries, based on household survey data, to provide an accurate and representative picture of the financial incentive to be in employment and to progress facing key groups in both countries.

By the end of the parliament, tax receipts are due to return to their pre-recession share of national income. However, compared with 2007/08, policy choices mean the taxman looks set to raise more from VAT and less from other indirect taxes; about the same amount from personal income taxes, though with more of that coming from the highest earners; less from the main property taxes; and substantially less from corporation tax. HM Treasury will be more reliant on small taxes, including five entirely new ones. Whether these changes have been part of a clear and coherent overarching strategy is, to put it kindly, unclear.

Immigration is often seen as an instrument of adaptation for ageing countries. In this paper, we evaluate, using a dynamic general equilibrium model, the contribution of migration policy in reducing the tax burden associated with the ageing population in France. Four alternative scenarios, compared with a baseline scenario based on official projections, are simulated with the aim of quantifying the effects of immigration on French social protection finances. We show that the age and, to a lesser extent, the skill structure of immigrants are the key features that mainly determine the effects on social protection finances. Overall, these effects are all the more positive in the short to medium term if the migration policy is selective (in favour of more skilled workers). In the long term, the beneficial effects of a selective policy may disappear. But whatever the degree of selectivity of the migration policy, the financial gains from higher consequent migration flows are relatively moderate compared with the demographic changes implied by ageing.