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...

Conventional in-work benefits (IWB) are means-tested, open to all workers with sufficiently low income, and usually paid without a time-limit. This paper evaluates an IWB with an alternative design that was aimed at lone parents in the UK and piloted in one third of the country, and that...

The current decade is one of significant fiscal austerity for government spending. The coalition government that came to power in 2010 has embarked on a path of fiscal consolidation that is now expected to last at least seven years (up to 2017-18), with tax increases and spending cuts that are...

This report updates and extends the previous IFS work to examine the consequences of these changes for graduates. In particular, we use a new model of graduate earnings and repayments and explore in more detail the pattern and size of loan repayments made, including by different types of graduates.

The UK is currently experiencing a period of considerable fiscal austerity. This has had profound implications for virtually all areas of public spending, including spending on higher education. In this report, we use our own model of graduate earnings and repayments to produce an independent...

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...

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...

The share of home-cooked food in the diet of UK households declined from the 1980s. This was contemporaneous with a decline in the market price of ingredients for home cooking relative to ready-to-eat foods. We consider a simple model of food consumption and time use which captures the key...

The Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) is a charity that aims to make apractical improvement to social mobility in the UK by encouraging and supporting access to "high-status" universities and professional occupations for high attaining pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The SMF's programmes...