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...

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...

In China, the employment rate among middle-aged and older urban residents is exceptionally low. For example, 27% of 55-64-year-old urban women were in work in 2013, compared to more than 50% in UK, Thailand and Philippines. This paper investigates potential explanations of this low level of...

This paper uses individual data on employment and wages to shed light on the UK's productivity puzzle. It finds that workforce composition cannot explain the reduction in wages and hence productivity that we observe; instead, real wages have fallen significantly within jobs. Why? One possibility...

Since the early-1990s the UK experienced an unprecedented increase in university graduates. The proportion of people with a university degree by age 30 more than doubled from 16% for born in 1965-69 to 33% for those born ten years later. At the same time the age profile of the graduate premium...

The goals of income transfer systems in the US and the UK for low-income families are to reduce poverty and welfare dependency and encourage work. Both the US and UK have made in-work benefits a key part of their strategy through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Working Families' Tax...

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...

The pensioner population a decade from now is likely to look different to today's population. There will not only be more pensioners but those retiring over the next few years will have experienced different economic conditions in their working lives, been subject to a different policy...