In October 2012, the ONS announced a consultation on whether the statistical methods used to calculate the Retail Prices Index (RPI) should be changed to bring them closer in line to those used in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). Previous IFS work has looked at how inflation rates varied across different households, using survey data on household expenditure to calculate RPI-based measures of household-specific inflation. This paper analyses whether CPI-based measures give similar results and the reasons behind any differences.

In this paper we look at lifetime inequality to address two main questions: How well does a modern tax system, based on annual information, target lifetime inequality? What aspects of the tranfser system are most progressive from a lifetime perspective?

Currently there is no established way to measure expenditure in the context of a general purpose survey. In this report NatCen's Questionnaire Development Testing (QDT) Hub, working in collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies and collaborators from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, look at how best to measure expenditure in a social survey context.

This report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, provides findings from a series of focus groups investigating how people think about household expenditure and what issues people may have in reporting household expenditure in a social survey context.

The Nuffield Foundation has funded a collaborative research team from NatCen Social Research, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Oxford and Cambridge Universities to develop a standard question or questions designed to capture household spending. This report presents the findings of this second round of cognitive testing.

This paper analyses raw data in the UK to show that the income loss on separation for women who were cohabiting is less than the loss for those who were married.

This paper analyses the impact of informality on growth and wages in developing countries.

Sharp nonparametric bounds are derived for Hicksian compensating and equivalent variations. These 'i-bounds' generalize earlier results of Blundell, Browning and Crawford (2008). We show that their e-bounds are sharp under the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP). They do not require transitivity. The new i-bounds are sharp under the Strong Axiom of Revealed Preference (SARP). By requiring transitivity they can be used to bound welfare measures. The new bounds on welfare measures are shown to be operationalized through algorithms that are easy to implement.

We use an RCT to analyze the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction, child and teenage labour supply, and education in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This paper investigates life cycle patterns of demand for services from household durables using UK panel data.