Council tax benefit (CTB) was abolished in April 2013 and local authorities in England were charged with designing their own council tax support (CTS) schemes in its place. Although these must maintain support for pensioners at its previous level, local authorities have had wide discretion to...

This report presents projections of relative and absolute income poverty among children and working-age adults in every year to 2016-17, and in 2020-21. The aim is to estimate the implications for household incomes- and hence, income poverty- of what we know about tax and benefit policy 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...

A growing literature on inference in difference-in-differences (DiD) designs with grouped errors has been pessimistic about obtaining hypothesis tests of the correct size, particularly with few groups. We provide Monte Carlo evidence for three points: (i) it is possible to obtain tests of the...

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...

Recent debates of basic income (BI) proposals shine a useful spotlight on the challenges that traditional forms of income support are increasingly facing, and highlight gaps in social provisions that largely depend on income or employment status. A universal "no questions asked" public transfer...

In April 2010 the UK's marginal rate of income tax above £150,000 was increased from 40% to 50%, affecting the highest-income 0.66% of the adult population (and 1% of income taxpayers). This would seem an ideal opportunity to obtain an estimate of the taxable income elasticity, but...