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...

UK business investment is the lowest in the G7 and among the lowest in the developed world. Tax has a role to play in shaping investment incentives, and the UK's corporate tax system is one of extremes. While the rate of corporation tax (19%) is exceptionally low, UK investment allowances are...

The tax system treats funds that remain in a pension at death extremely favourably. Where an individual dies before age 75, funds remaining in their pension escape income tax entirely - there was income tax relief when the money was paid into the pension and no income tax when the money is taken...

We analyse the impact of the possible approaches to council tax reform set out in the Welsh Government's consultation on "A fairer council tax".