 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.
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IFS is involved in assessing the effectiveness of a number of labour market programmes, tax and transfer programmes and social programmes in a variety of fields, from education and training, to labour supply, childcare, health and welfare. In the presence of limited public resources, determining whether such policy interventions work and whether their cost is justified is of crucial importance and allows policy decisions to be guided by evidence on actual programme effectiveness.
The difficulty in estimating the causal impact of a programme is that we can never observe the outcome programme participants would have experienced had they not participated. Constructing this unobserved counterfactual is the central issue that evaluation methods need to address. In addition to the evaluation of specific government interventions, our research has been contributing to the development of econometric and statistical methods to address the evaluation problem. Search
The Government defends its intention to scrap EMA - and replace it with a smaller payment - on the grounds that the EMA is expensive and fails to deliver enough bang for its buck. But what does the evidence on the effectiveness of the EMA show?
Orazio Attanasio, Emla Fitzsimons, Ana Gomez, Martha Isabel Gutiérrez, Costas Meghir and Alice Mesnard
The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer program implemented in rural areas in Colombia since 2002, on school enrollment and child labor.
This is a case study by Techneos, who produce survey software, on the use of their mobile survey software by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and MaiMwana to look at poverty and reproductive health in Malawi.
Orazio Attanasio, Erich Battistin and Alice Mesnard
We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia.
This paper reviews some of the most popular policy evaluation methods in empirical microeconomics.
Primary school enrolment and completion rates are almost universal in rural Mexico. In this paper, we investigate whether the primary school transfer generates positive externalities in the household.
This article asks how best to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes.
The differential performance of six Swedish active labour market programs for the unemployed is investigated in terms of short- and long-term employment probability and unemployment-benefit dependency.
Browse publications & research
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 Started: 01 July 2010
Started: 01 April 2010
Started: 01 January 2010
Started: 01 November 2009
Started: 01 September 2009
   An IFS assessment of the effectiveness of the Education Maintenance Allowance informed the Government’s decision to extend the policy nationwide in 2004.
We run a policy evaluation methods course that has trained practitioners inside and outside government how to conduct an evaluation and interpret the results.
We have written free software to implement matching methods, substantially reducing the barriers faced by practitioners in using such methods.
Our ERA analysis contributed to the evaluation literature and informed the Government about the validity of the experimental findings.
IFS evaluated the Pathways to Work programme. This work proved key to the policy debate about how to get disability benefit claimants in work.
IFS researchers found that the In-Work Credit encouraged lone parents to leave benefit more quickly but did not increase work retention.
IFS research has contributed to consultation with governments in developing countries on the design of health and welfare programmes.
Researchers at IFS have advised OPORTUNIDADES on the design and evaluation of new scholarships, and are carrying out its impact evaluation.
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