This paper examines the distributional impact of increases to out-of-work transfers, increases to work-contingent transfers, and increases in higher rates of income tax over the whole of life. We find that, in contrast to what is implied by standard snapshot analyses, increases to...

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...

Most analysis of the effects of the tax and benefit system is based on snapshot information about a single cross-section of people. Such an approach gives only a partial picture because it cannot account for the fact that circumstances change over life. This paper investigates how our impression...

We investigate bunching at personal tax thresholds over a 40-year period. At kinks, where the marginal tax rate rises, we find bunching among company owner-managers and the self-employed, but not those with only employment income. Notches, where the average rate rises, provide compelling...

A significant gap exists in the UK between the employment rate for Ethnic Minorities and that for Whites. From a policy perspective, it is important to know whether this gap is due to differences in the characteristics of White and Ethnic Minority groups (which reduce the employability of Ethnic...

We consider the impact of tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We analyse both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion and...

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...

This document describes the UK tax and benefit system between April 1990 and April 2010, as implemented in FORTAX, a microsimulation library written in Fortran. It begins with an overview of FORTAX and the information it calculates. Subsequent sections describe the taxes and benefits implemented...

Personal taxes and benefits affect the incentive to work over the lifecycle by altering income-age profiles, insuring against adverse shocks, and changing the returns to human capital. Previous work investigating the impact of taxes and benefits on work incentives has tended to ignore these...

Relatively little is known about the roles that taxes and transfers play in redistributing resources and providing insurance across individuals and across the lifecycle. We embed these alternative roles in a lifecycle model, allowing us to demonstrate what the tax and transfer system achieves...