This paper reviews various techniques for quantifying financial incentives to work, shows how financial work incentives have changed across the population since 1979, and estimates how much of these changes are due to changes in the tax and benefit system.

Following the seminal paper by Altonji and Segal (1996), empirical studies have widely embraced equal or diagonal weighting in minimum distance estimation to mitigate the finite-sample bias caused by sampling errors in the weighting matrix. This paper introduces a new weighting scheme that...

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...

This paper examines the tax schedule for low income families with children. We take an optimal tax approach based on a structural labour supply model which incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system....

The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supply model. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considers purely Pareto improving...

We present evidence from a natural field experiment and structural model designed to shed light on the efficacy of alternative fundraising schemes. In conjunction with the Bavarian State Opera, we mailed 25,000 opera attendees a letter describing a charitable fundraising project organized by the...

In this paper, we estimate a theory-consistent model of single parents labour supply behaviour using a variant of the semi-log labour supply function. The underlying preferences are used to simulate the impact of a proposed reform to the Family Credit element of the UK Social Security system...

This paper extends behavioural microsimulation modelling so that third round effects of a policy change can be simulated. The first round effects relate to fixed hours of work, while second round effects allow for changes in desired hours of work at unchanged wages. These allow for endogenous...

Childcare subsidies are typically advocated as a means to making paid employment profitable for mothers, but also have important ramifications for the use and quality of paid childcare. Even if one is concerned primarily with the quantity aspect, the quality dimension cannot be ignored. This...