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.
|
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
Kim Perren, Sue Middleton and Carl Emmerson
This report contains a summary of quantitative evidence from an evaluation of the Education
Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir and Miguel Székely
In this paper we discuss the issues involved with the evaluation of social interventions and with the attempts at 'scaling them up'.
Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir and Miguel Szekely
In this paper we discuss the issues involved with the evaluation of social interventions and with the attempts at 'scaling them up'.
Four alternative but related approaches to empirical evaluation of policy interventions are studied.
Four alternative but related approaches to empirical evaluation of policy interventions are studied: social experiments, natural experiments, matching methods, and instrumental variables.
The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has commissioned a longitudinal evaluation
The Swedish model of active labour market programmes is investigated in relation to some crucial institutional features with two aims: examining how successful it has been in the context of the high unemployment atypically experienced by Sweden in the 1990s and trying to derive some general lessons as to which type of programme works best.
This paper investigates how effective the Swedish labour market programmes have been in improving the opportunities of unemployed individuals over the last decade.
The paper evaluates the differential performance of the six main types of Swedish programmes that were available to adult unemployed workers enTitled to unemployment benefits in the 1990s: labour market training, workplace introduction, work experience placement, relief work, trainee replacement and employment subsidies.
This evaluation focuses on the four models of EMA that were introduced into the
Browse publications & research
|
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.
|

