IFS Online News

In this issue

Welcome to the first IFS e-newsletter. This will be a regular bulletin, letting you know about recent research, publications and press releases.

With the date of the general election confirmed today as May 5th, the campaign has finally moved from phoney to formal. Over the coming month we at IFS will be doing what we can to contribute to a well-informed public debate on the key economic and social policy issues that will be fought over by the parties. We will be producing briefing notes on several policy topics, comparing the party proposals and responding to some of the comments and claims made on the campaign trail. You can see our election coverage online; we will update these pages as more analysis is completed throughout the campaign.

In this issue, we also highlight our Green Budget, in which we presented our annual analysis of the issues confronting Gordon Brown in framing this year's Budget. You can also see details of the latest issue of Fiscal Studies: the March issue contains a symposium of papers about pension reform, looking at the effects on current and future pensioners of reforms in the UK and abroad.

Robert Chote
Director

Green Budget 2005

For the first time the Green Budget was this year produced in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, with additional funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. We examined the Chancellor's fiscal rules and whether they might force him to announce fresh tax increases or cut spending. More about Green Budget 2005

Other recent publications

Working papers Retail productivity Rachel Griffith and Heike Harmgart, 29 March 2005 Household Nash equilibrium with voluntarily contributed public goods Valérie Lechene and Ian Preston, 03 March 2005 The impact of parental income and education on the schooling of their children Arnaud Chevalier, Colm Harmon, Vincent O'Sullivan and Ian Walker, 11 February 2005

Briefing notes and reports Poverty and inequality in Britain: 2005 Mike Brewer, Alissa Goodman, Jonathan Shaw and Andrew Shephard, 30 March 2005 Higher Education funding policy: who wins and who loses? Lorraine Dearden, Emla Fitzsimons, Alissa Goodman and Greg Kaplan, 18 March 2005 How effective are conditional cash transfers? Evidence from Colombia Orazio Attanasio, Erich Battistin, Emla Fitzsimons, Alice Mesnard and Marcos Vera-Hernandez, 12 January 2005

Research news

The Centre for Early Years and Education Research at IFS (CEYER) has won a contract from the Department for Work and Pensions to undertake, with the Policy Studies Institute (PSI), a project analysing ethnic parity in Jobcentre Plus programmes and mainstream services. More about ethnic parity project