Taxes and benefits

This note compares three policies that have been recently suggested which would change the way that families with children are treated by the tax and benefit system.

The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer program implemented in rural areas in Colombia since 2002, on school enrollment and child labor.

This paper evaluates the effect of excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers.

Data from market research firms are increasingly being used by social science researchers. These data provide potentially useful information, including detailed nutritional information and well-measured prices, and their panel structure is appealing as it permits researchers to control for unobservable time-invariant household characteristics and to model dynamic aspects of household behaviour.

This paper seeks to fill this gap by providing an in-depth examination of data from one company, Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), recording grocery purchases over five years. We assess how far the ongoing demands of participation lead to 'fatigue' in respondents' recording of their spending and the implications for household attrition, and we provide a detailed comparison of the expenditure data collected by TNS and the well-established Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS). Broadly, we suggest that problems of fatigue and attrition may not be particularly severe, though there are differences in expenditures that cannot be attributed to demographic or time effects and may be suggestive of survey mode effects.

This paper assesses the key conceptual and practical challenges dynamic scoring poses and considers the pros and cons of adopting it.

This paper reviews how income-support systems affacte labour force participation in the UK.

New research published today by the Department for Work and Pensions estimates the labour market impact of a set of five government policies designed to help lone parents into work.

This is an executive summary of a report,

This report estimates the impact of the lone parent pilots on the benefit and work outcomes of lone parents who had been receiving Income Support (IS) or Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA).

The Government is concerned that we are eating too much saturated fat.