In this paper we look at lifetime inequality to address two main questions: How well does a modern tax system, based on annual information, target lifetime inequality? What aspects of the tranfser system are most progressive from a lifetime perspective? To answer to these questions it is crucial...

It is often argued that informal labor markets in developing countries promote growth by reducing the impact of regulation. On the other hand informality may reduce the amount of social protection offered to workers. We extend the wage-posting framework of Burdett and Mortensen (1998) to allow...

We use an RCT to analyse the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction in Bosnia. The study population are loan applicants that would normally have just been rejected based on regular screening. We find that access to credit allowed borrowers to start and expand small-scale businesses....

Sharp nonparametric bounds are derived for Hicksian compensating and equivalent variations. These 'i-bounds' generalize earlier results of Blundell, Browning and Crawford (2008). We show that their e-bounds are sharp under the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP). They do not require...

The Nuffield Foundation has funded a collaborative research team from NatCen Social Research, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Oxford and Cambridge Universities to develop a standard question or questions designed to capture household spending. This is because household spending can be an...

Currently there is no established way to measure expenditure in the context of a general purpose survey. Therefore NatCen's Questionnaire Development Testing (QDT) Hub, working in collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies and collaborators from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, are...

Currently there is no established way to measure expenditure in the context of a general purpose survey. Therefore NatCen's Questionnaire Development and Testing (QDT) Hub, working in collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies and collaborators from Oxford and Cambridge Universities,...

In October 2012, the ONS announced a consultation on whether the statistical methods used to calculate the Retail Prices Index (RPI) should be changed to bring them closer in line to those used in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). Previous IFS work has looked at how inflation rates varied across...

This paper considers the case for replacing the Carli index in the Retail Prices Index for calculating price changes at the elementary aggregate level. Following Diewert (2012), we go through each of the three approaches used to select appropriate index numbers: the test, stochastic and economic...

Public spending in the UK in 2008/9 amounted to over £10,000 per person or about 43% of national income (Crawford, Emmerson and Tetlow 2009) while net receipts from tax and social security contributions exceeded £8,000 per person or about 35% of national income. These transfers of resources...