Over-indebtedness, defined as the inability for a household to meet both essential living expenses and debt repayments, continues to be a significant phenomenon throughout Europe. The problem plays out differently in various countries depending on the relevant credit market, culture around...

This paper analyses the direct and indirect trade volume and trade cost effects of uncertainty on international trade and economic welfare using a structural gravity framework for a panel of 97 developed and developing countries from 2000 to 2018. Our results suggest that an increase in...

In contrast to the UK, the USA and Germany, the majority of students in economics in France are female. Using a national survey of three cohorts of French university graduates in economics, we examine the gender differential in early career earnings. There is a significant raw differential in...

The United Kingdom's (UK) property markets are thought to be a common destination for corrupt and criminal assets and money laundering, with investment often through offshore shell companies. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we study the impact of the introduction of a policy...

Robert Triffin (1911-1993) was one of the main protagonists in the international monetary debates in the postwar period. He became famous with his book Gold and the Dollar Crisis, published in 1960, in which he predicted the end of the Bretton Woods system. In his analysis there, Triffin was...

The aim of this report, the IFS's first in-depth analysis of the Scottish Government Budget, is to look at some of the key implications for the coming year, and for the longer term. We do not attempt to cover all of the different services that the Scottish Government is responsible for, or all...

One year ago, NHS England published its plan to tackle the backlog of elective care, which had surged following the onset of the pandemic. Since then, as widely expected, waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have continued to grow, increasing by around 1 million between February and...

How should pensions be taxed? We propose income tax and National Insurance reforms that would more evenly support pension saving. Pensions are the biggest component of household wealth and are treated favourably by the tax system. That means getting pensions tax design right matters. It matters...

We revisit the so-called "secular international problem", whereby the adjustment of current account imbalances purportedly falls entirely on the shoulders of deficit countries. We introduce a stylised model to rationalise an asymmetric counter-cyclical policy reaction that is stronger for...

Using matched employer-employee data for Italy and newly available information on sick leaves certificates, we study the effect of an exogenous increase in the length of the residual work horizon - triggered by a pension reform that increased minimum retirement age - on middle-aged employees'...

This study explores the impact of industrialization on secondary schooling in 19th century France. As a source of exogenous variation in industrialization across the French territory, it takes advantage of the openings and closures of mines which were supervised by the Ministry of Public Works,...

Unemployment is notoriously difficult to predict. In previous studies, once country and year fixed effects are added to panel estimates, few variables predict changes in unemployment rates. Using panel data for 29 European countries collected by the European Commission over 444 months between...

This paper explores the effectiveness of the voluntary reform. It studies a voluntary healthcare reform that was implemented in Ireland in 2008. The analysis is conducted using a theoretical model and empirical evidence. In 2008, in the hope to reduce waiting lists, new contracts were issued...

In this paper we use linked Census data to document rates of intergenerational housing mobility across ethnic groups in England and Wales. While home ownership has declined across all ethnic groups, we find substantial differences between them, with Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi households...

This paper contributes to the debate on the revision of the Barcelona targets on childcare, as promoted by the European Commission in 2022, that aims to provide childcare for children below the age of 3. Using EUROLAB, a structural model of labour supply that can also accounts for labour demand...

Due to their negative effects on surrounding neighborhoods, some countries have gradually been replacing distressed public housing developments with mixed-income housing. This paper studies the effects of such policies on local housing markets in London (UK), where local authorities demolished...

We study the impact of commercial property taxation on vacancy rates and rents in the UK, using a new data-set, and exploiting exogenous variations in property tax rates from reliefs in the UK system: small business rate relief (SBRR), retail relief and empty property relief. We estimate that...

The UK imports many doctors from abroad, where medical training and experience might be different. This study attempts to understand how drug prescription behaviour differs in English GP practices which have larger or smaller numbers of foreign-trained GPs. Results show that in general practices...

The end of free movement and the introduction of the post-Brexit migration system represents a major structural change to the UK labour market. We provide a descriptive assessment of the impact on a sectoral basis. We examine how overall labour force growth has differed between sectors, both...

How willing are individual primary dealers to alter their offered yields in central bank quantitative easing auctions of government bonds in order to sell an additional share of the outstanding amount of a bond to the central bank? This question is of great importance for a central bank's...

This paper studies if workers infer from correlation about causal effects in the context of the part-time wage penalty. Differences in hourly pay between full-time and part-time workers are strongly driven by worker selection and systematic sorting. Ignoring these selection effects can lead to...