Facts and figures about UK taxes, benefits and public spending.
Income distribution, poverty and inequality.
Analysing government fiscal forecasts and tax and spending.
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.
|
Type: IFS Working Papers Authors: Britta Augsburg, Ralph De Haas, Heike Harmgart and Costas Meghir
JEL classification: 016, G21, D21, I32 Keywords: Microfinance, liquidity constraints, human capital, randomized controlled trial
We use an RCT to analyze the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction, child and teenage labour supply, and education in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The study population consists of loan applicants that regular screening would have marginally rejected. Access to credit allowed borrowers to start and expand small-scale businesses. Households that already had a business and where the borrower had more education, ran down savings, presumably to complement the loan and achieve the minimum investment amount. However, in less-educated households consumption went down. A key new finding is a substantial increase in the labor supply of children aged 16-19 year old together with a reduction in their school attendance, raising important questions about the unintended intergenerational consequences of relaxing liquidity constraints for self-employment and business creation or expansion. Search |
View all IFS Working Papers in the series
Recent IFS Working Papers
Identifying the drivers of month of birth differences in educational attainment
This paper is the first to apply the principle of maximum entropy to the month of birth problem.
The drivers of month of birth differences in children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills: a regression discontinuity analysis
This paper uses data from a rich UK birth cohort to estimate the differences in cognitive and non-cognitive skills between children born at the start and end of the academic year.
The impact of age within academic year on adult outcomes
We provide the first evidence on whether differences in childhood outcomes translate into differences in the probability of employment, occupation and earnings for adults in the UK.
|


