New IFS research published today demonstrates the compelling case for road pricing as part of a radical overhaul of the way in which motoring is taxed. Current taxes - excise duties on road fuel and vehicle excise duty - are unable to capture the substantial variation by time and location in the external costs associated with motoring. At the same time, official forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest revenues from these current taxes are set to erode significantly in the medium-term. Road pricing would provide not only a more economically rational way of taxing motoring but also a more sustainable tax base.

This report looks at the options for taxing motoring, concluding that a system of road pricing or congestion charging would be preferable to the current system.

Politicians often say they want to see income inequality or poverty fall. The current fiscal climate, and the government's aim to eliminate the budget deficit mostly through spending cuts, constrain the scope for additional large-scale fiscal redistribution in the near future. It is therefore natural to ask what role labour market changes might play in the years ahead. With this in mind, work co-authored by IFS researchers and published today considers the likely impact of changes in the mix of jobs over the rest of this decade on typical measures of income poverty and income inequality.

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions.

Using survey data spanning multiple house-price cycles over nearly forty years, this paper documents the association between house prices and homeownership at age thirty.

We use these data and earlier ELSA waves first to document the effect of the crisis on the finances of those aged 50 and over in England, and second, to estimate the effect of wealth shocks on household consumption and individual expectations of the future.

This paper uses various techniques to look for accurate measurements of trends in consumption inequality as well as income inequality.

These slides were presented at an IFS workshop, 'Resource Allocation within Households' on 30 March 2012.

This presentation was given at a conference on 29 March organised by Income Data Services about pay in the public sector.

The Home Office have unveiled their alcohol strategy to reduce excess alcohol consumption. Notably, it includes a proposal to introduce a minimum price per alcohol unit in England and Wales, suggesting 40p as a likely rate. Analysing the detailed off-licence alcohol purchase data of more than 19,000 households, this observation argues that the policy would be a very significant intervention.