The UK government is in the process of introducing a radical package of welfare reforms that it hopes will encourage more people to work as well as reducing government expenditure. The largest structural change planned is the introduction of universal credit to combine six existing means-tested...

Conventional in-work benefits or tax credits are now well established as a policy instrument for increasing labour supply and tackling poverty. A different sort of in-work credit is one where the payments are time-limited, conditional on previous receipt of welfare, and, perhaps, not...

<p>Governments wishing to reduce inequality by redistributing money from the rich to the poor face the dilemma that in doing so (by increasing tax rates and means-tested benefits, for example) they reduce the incentive for individuals to increase their incomes. Policy-makers have tried to balance...</p>

<p>As a result of the Child Poverty Act (2010), current and future governments are committed to reducing the rate of relative income child poverty in the UK to 10% by 2020-21. This paper looks in detail at the progress made towards this goal under the previous Labour administrations. Direct tax and...</p>

This paper explains the methodology used for calculating pension wealth for all individuals in the first wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). We focus on the pension wealth of individuals aged between 50 and the state pension age. Both state and private pension wealth has...

<p>Faced with ageing populations, OECD governments are seeking policies to increase individual retirement saving. In April 2001, the UK government introduced Stakeholder Pensions - a low cost retirement saving vehicle. The reform also changed the structure of tax-relieved contribution ceilings,...</p>

<p><p>As private sector employers have moved away from providing final salary defined benefit (DB) pensions to their employees, attention has increasingly focused on the public sector's continued provision of such pensions and the value of these pension promises to public sector employees. The...</p></p>

In this paper we use the two waves of the British Retirement Survey (1988/89 and 1994) to quantify the relationship between socio-economic status and health outcomes. We find that, even after conditioning on the initial health status, wealth rankings are important determinants of mortality and...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of individuals in households in England aged between 50 and the State Pension Age in terms of their private pension arrangements and current non-pension assets alongside their expectations of future economic circumstances. Our descriptive findings include...

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s Pensim2 model is a dynamic microsimulation model. The principal purpose of this model is to estimate the future distribution of pensioner incomes, thus enabling analysis of the distributional effects of proposed changes to pension policy. This paper...