Facts and figures about UK taxes, benefits and public spending.
Income distribution, poverty and inequality.
Analysing government fiscal forecasts and tax and spending.
 | ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy. |
Analysis of the fiscal choices an independent Scotland would face.
Case studies that give a flavour of the areas where IFS research has an impact on society.
Reforming the tax system for the 21st century.
A peer-reviewed quarterly journal publishing articles by academics and practitioners.
|
 |
Consumer behaviour and living standards over the lifecycle
|
Date started: 01 September 2012
Research in this area looks at how much households save, spend and borrow at different stages in the life-cycle. A greater understanding of how consumers allocate their spending over time can help answer questions about how consumption and saving will respond to changes in household circumstances, as well as the degree to which consumers bring forward or postpone purchases in response to changes in interest rates and taxes.
|
|
This paper investigates life cycle patterns of demand for services from household durables using UK panel data.
|
|
|
This paper compares consumption and income as measures of households’ living standards using UK data.
|
|
|
Parallels are increasingly being drawn between current economic circumstances and those of the 1970s. In this Briefing Note we take the opportunity to reflect on a few of the ways in which economic life has changed since the Silver Jubilee year.
|
|
|
The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions.
|
|
|
Using survey data spanning multiple house-price cycles over nearly forty years, this paper documents the association between house prices and homeownership at age thirty.
|
|
|
This paper uses various techniques to look for accurate measurements of trends in consumption inequality as well as income inequality.
|
|
|
We model individual demand for housing over the life-cycle, and show the aggregate implications of this behaviour.
|
|
|
This paper examines trends in household consumption and saving behaviour in each of the last three recessions in the UK.
|
|
|
New research published today by the IFS throws more light on the nature of the recent recession and its impact on households.
|
|
|
This presentation was delivered at the Geary Institute, University College Dublin.
|
|
|
This Commentary analyses recent trends in household spending, with a focus on domestic fuel and water, and examines the impact of changes in the price of these goods on household inflation.
|
|
|
Households receiving the winter fuel payment are almost 14 times as likely to spend the money on fuel than would have been the case had their incomes been increased in other ways; But in very cold weather it remains the case that the poorest pensioners cut back on spending on food to finance the additional cost of heating their homes.
|
|
|
This presentation was delivered at the IFS briefing 'Cash by any other name? evidence on labelling from the UK Winter Fuel Payment', 8 June 2011.
|
|
|
We study the UK Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) and find robust evidence of a behavioural effect of the labelling.
|
|
|
We find evidence that the poorest of older households are unable to smooth spending over the worst temperature shocks.
|
|
|
We show in a tractable life-cycle model how the optimal unemployment replacement ratio and the fall in consumption on job loss depend on the cost of self-insurance and the cost of borrowing.
|
|
|
We show that lottery players display higher income effects than non-players but only amongst those likely to be credit constrained.
|
|
|
We discuss recent developments in the literature that studies how the dynamics of earnings and wages affect consumption choices over the life cycle.
|
|
|
This presentation was delivered on November 23rd at University College Dublin.
|
|
|
In recent months, there has been much speculation that the Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) will be abolished or restricted as part of the forthcoming programme of spending cuts. In this observation we contribute to this debate by summarising what the WFP does, and does not, achieve.
|
|
|
This is a chapter of the wave 4 analysis of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.
|
|
|
Presented at a seminar in the Department of Economics at Royal Holloway University of London on 29 September.
|
|
|
This report looks at the level of wealth and the rate of saving of households in the UK on the eve of the global economic crisis.
|
|
|
These slides were delivered at the Lincome College Applied Microeconometrics Conference at the University of Oxford.
|
|
|
This paper uses a survey-based approach to test alternative methods of channeling tax relief to donors - as a tax rebate for the donor or as a matched payment to the receiving charity.
|
|
|
This paper discusses recent developments in the literature that studies how the dynamics of earnings and wages affect consumption choices over the life cycle.
|
|
|
This paper builds a unifying framework that, within the theory of intertemporal consumption choices, brings together the limited participation-based explanation of the poor empirical performance of the C-CAPM and the transaction costs-based explanation of incomplete portfolios.
|
|
|
Dimensions of Tax Design brings together a high-profile group of more than fifty international experts and younger researchers.
|
|
|
This paper presents an analysis of the trends in inequality across income, earnings and consumption in Britain since 1978.
|
|
|
This paper looks at how households in temporarily straitened circumstances due to an unemployment spell cut back on expenditure.
|
|
|
We show empirically that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income.
|
|
|
Invited Lecture at the Latin American Meeting of the Econometric Society
|
|
|
part of set of IFS analysis presented at DWP research seminar on the dynamics of work, health savings and retirement
|
|
|
Higher energy prices between 2004 and 2007 coincided with substantially higher fuel spending and lower fuel consumption for older households, according to research published today.
|
|
|
This Commentary examines detailed trends in expenditure patterns between 1995 and 2007, with a particular focus on the pensioner population.
|
|
|
This presentation was given at a seminar on pension saving and the macroeconomy organised by the Department for Work and Pensions.
|
|
|
This presentation was given on 5th May 2009, at the Department for Work and Pensions, London
|
|
|
This paper documents the potential and actual savings that consumers realize from four particular types of purchasing behavior: purchasing on sale; buying in bulk (at a lower per unit price); buying generic brands; and choosing outlets.
|
|
|
This paper concerns the decomposition of income risk into permanent and transitory components using repeated cross-section data on income and consumption.
|
|
|
In this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy.
|
|
|
Analysis of the third wave of data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.
|
|
|
We consider the measurement of the cost of job displacement.
|
|
|
This chapter looks at some simple patterns emerging from ELSA to paint a broad-brush picture of the distribution of outcomes that can be expected for the cohort members between now and when they reach the state pension age.
|
|
|
<p>This presentation was given on:</p><p>December 18th 2008, Sydney</p><p>December 16th 2008, Australian Department of Treasury</p> <p>April 16th 2008, Bilkent University, Turkey</p><p>May 21st 2008, University of York</p><p>May 28th 2008, Bank of Spain</p>
|
|
|
This paper describes the transmission of income inequality into consumption inequality and in so doing investigates the degree of insurance to income shocks.
|
|
|
This paper was prepared ahead of the Royal Economic Society Conference 2008.
|
|
|
In this presentation, Professor Timothy Besley discusses some of the findings in and implications of his recent research looking at the link between the terms on which households can access credit and the behaviour of consumers.
|
|
|
In this paper, we show that ignoring consumption inequality within households produces misleading estimates of inequality.
|
|
|
This paper uses a structural model to address the question of why home-owners with large mortgage debt work longer hours than those without such debt.
|
|
|
This draft paper forms part of the Mirrlees Review and was presented at the IFS Residential Conference 2007.
|
|
|
This paper investigates consumer expenditures of German households pre and post retirement.
|
|
|
Presentation at the launch of the report covering the second wave of the ELSA survey.
|
|
|
This chapter looks at individual's spending and consumption patterns.
|
|
|
These slides were presented at the launch of the publication, Household Spending in Britain: what can it teach us about poverty?
|
|
|
Much of the recent policy debate surrounding poverty in Britain focuses on income as a measure of living standards. In this report we consider one alternative to income for measuring poverty that has been largely overlooked in the mainstream poverty debate in the UK: namely household expenditure.
|
|
|
When household spending, rather than income, is used to measure living standards, relative poverty in Britain has risen, rather than fallen, since 1997.
|
|
|
These slides were presented at the launch of the publication, Household Spending in Britain: what can it teach us about poverty?
|
|
|
This article looks and income and substitution effects and demand for nursery education.
|
|
|
This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effect of population aging on the aggregate demand for goods and services between 2000 and 2040.
|
|
|
Recent theoretical contributions have suggested consumption externalities, or peergroup effects, as a potential explanation for some of the puzzles in macroeconomics and finance.
|
|
|
In this report, we assess the short-term impact of the Colombian welfare programme Familias en Acción on consumption and its components.
|
|
|
We examine the effects of different forms of feedback information on the performance of markets that suffer from moral hazard problems due to sequential exchange.
|
|
|
We develop and test a model on the effects of spatial housing price risk on housing choice.
|
|
|
Job losers exhibit significant heterogeneity in wealth holdings and in the marginal propensity to consume transitory income.
|
|
|
This paper describes the transmission of income inequality into consumptioninequality and in so doing investigates the degree of insurance to incomeshocks.
|
|
|
We examine the effects of different forms of feedback information on
|
|
|
This paper assesses the accuracy of decomposing income risk into permanent and transitory components using income and consumption data.
|
|
|
This report sets out what has happened to income and expenditure inequality in the 1990s and early 2000s, comparing the changes to previous decades. Although income is very often used for assessing living standards in this country, spending is often more informative, because many people can choose to borrow, save or run down their savings at any given time, in order to adjust their standard of living.
|
|
|
his paper uses UK panel data to shed further light on the fall in spending at retirement (the retirement-consumption puzzle).
|
|
|
This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States.
|
|
|
This paper presents evidence on the relationship between shocks to relative male wages and changes in household consumption in Mexico during the 1990s decade, which is a period characterized by high volatility.
|
|
|
How and why has the way in which the average British family spends its money changed over the past 25 years? Those are the key questions examined in this report, using data from the UK FES between 1975 and 1999. It looks not only at broad changes in total spending, but also at how the division of expenditure between basics and non-basics and between durable goods, non-durable goods and services has altered over time.
|
|
|
In this paper we investigate the way consumption changes around retirement in Italy.
|
|
|
In this paper we model the changing distribution of household spending in the UK over the period 1978 to 1999 and explore the interpretation of remaining time trends in spending once changes in other observed covariates have been accounted for.
|
|
|
This paper provides new evidence on the substitutability between private and pension wealth by exploiting the Italian pension reform of 1992.
|
|
|
Forthcoming
|
|
|
This paper uses panel data on household consumption and income to evaluate the degree of insurance to income shocks.
|
|
|
We investigate the possibility that limited participation in asset markets, and the stock market in particular, might explain the lack of correspondence between the sample moments of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution and asset returns in U.K. data.
|
|
|
This paper studies the paths from inequality in earnings to inequality in household consumption.
|
|
|
The poor in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to adverse shocks.
|
|
|
In this paper we model the evolution of income risk and consumption growth.
|
|
|
The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component.
|
|
|
In this paper we model the evolution ofincome risk and consumption growth
|
|
|
In this article we argue that the life-cycle model that allows demographics to affect household preferences and relaxes the assumption of certainty equivalence can generate hump-shaped consumption profiles over age that are very similar to those observed in household-level data sources.
|
|
|
This paper addresses whether households save enough for their retirement.
|
|
|
This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.
|
|
|
As the government nears the end of a consultation process on charity taxation, this commentary considers some of the key issues in the debate. What are the economic arguments for tax relief? Is there any evidence that tax incentives have a big effect on individual donations? What has been the impact of tax incentives in the UK? What are so-called `US-style tax deductions and how might they work in the UK? What other reforms to the current system of tax relief might the government consider?
|
|
|
This research is concerned with the demand for lottery tickets and uses data for the UK National Lottery that records the behaviour, incomes and characteristics of almost 10,000 individuals.
|
|
|
It is well known that over the next few decades there will be significant changes in the demographic structures of nearly all developed countries; in the absence of massive immigration, or of catastrophic new fatal illnesses, by the middle of the next century the ratio of people of working age to those of retirement age will, in many countries, be only around one half the current level.
|
|
|
This paper illustrates recent trends in household consumption and personal savings in the UK and the US and discusses some theoretical models that can be used to interpret them.
|
|
|
This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.
|
|
|
The charitable giving of UK households has changed considerably over the past 20 years. In particular, the proportion of households giving to charity fell by 5 percentage points between 1974 and 1993-94. An increase in the average size of donations meant that total voluntary income.
|
|
|
In this report we describe the charitable giving behaviour of UK households over the last two decades.
|
|
|
In this paper we ask whether households are saving enough for their retirement.
|
|
|
Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption.
|
|
|
The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern.
|
|
|
Much of the debate over inequality in the UK has focused on household incomes. This study provides details of trends in household spending levels. It finds that the inequality of household expenditures has risen much more slowly over the 1980s than the inequality of household incomes.
|
|
|
We argue that once one departs from simple classroom example, or 'stripped down life-cycle model', the empirical model for consumption growth can be made flexible enough to fit the main features of the data.
|
|
|
In this paper we use household level data on income and expenditure to analyse the importance of precautionary saving in the UK.
|
|
|
The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro-level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand.
|
|
|
