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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper we discuss two alternative approaches to constructing complete adult life-cycles using data from an 18-year panel. The first of these is a splicing approach - closely related to imputation - that involves stitching together individuals observed at different ages. The second is a...

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 estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation - including education, and savings for women in the UK, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy. We find substantial elasticities for labor supply and particularly for lone...

This paper provides an empirical account of the dynamic return to work, and how this is affected by taxes and benefits. In doing so we bring the insights from the literature on dynamic labour supply to the issue of estimating the financial return to work and how it is taxed, where the past...

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...