Interim report for the DWP

Article for Economics Letters

Chapter from the interim report on Local Housing Allowance for the DWP

New research published today provides fresh evidence on the extent to which their month of birth continues to affect individuals throughout their lives.

This paper is the first to apply the principle of maximum entropy to the month of birth problem.

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.

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.

This report aims to inform policy debate by providing clear evidence on the magnitude of the differences in outcomes between children and adults born at the start and end of the academic year in England.

The UK is in the fourth year of a planned eight-year fiscal tightening. Following further announcements made in Budget 2013, this fiscal consolidation is now forecast to total £143 billion by 2017–18. The UK is intending the fourth largest fiscal consolidation among the 29 advanced economies for which comparable data are available. By the end of this financial year, half of the total consolidation is expected to have been implemented. However, within this tax increases and cuts to investment spending have been relatively front-loaded, while cuts to welfare spending and other non-investment spending have been relatively back-loaded.