 Facts and figures about UK taxes, benefits and public spending.
Analysing government fiscal forecasts and tax and spending.
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.
Find out where you are in the income distribution.
Resources for schools and students.
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Since its foundation in the 1960s, the IFS has been studying developments in the UK's tax and social security system. This continues to be a core part of the Institute's work, making a particularly important contribution to public debate around the government's annual set pieces of the Budget and Pre-Budget Report, and the Institute's own Green Budget. Research at the IFS concentrates on describing and analysing changes and proposed changes to the tax and social security system, and in using large cross-sectional household datasets to model the impact of reforms on individuals' incomes and behaviour. Below, we present specific projects that researchers at the IFS have worked on in recent years, although the constant need to maintain the Institute's tax and benefit model means that IFS researchers are familiar with almost all areas of personal tax and social security in the UK.
The objectives of this project is to study how individuals' labour supply is affected by the structure of the tax and benefit system and to what extent the different work patterns observed in France, the UK and the US (and how these have changed over time) can be explained by the different tax and benefit structures. The project aims at using household data sets and microsimulation models of tax and benefit systems in a comparable manner across these three countries.
The aim of this review is to bring together a high-profile group of international experts and younger researchers to identify the characteristics of a good tax system for any open developed economy in the 21st century, to assess the extent to which the UK tax system conforms to these ideals, and to recommend how it might realistically be reformed in that direction.
Resources and analysis relating to the 2010 Spending Review.
Analysis of the three main parties' proposals in the run-up to the general election 2010 and of Labour's record between 1997 and 2010.
Changes to participation and marginal tax rates, and changes in employment and labour supply will be described, and the changes will be placed in the context of the significant changes to the tax system in the 1980s.
With this short project, we intend to provide a descriptive analysis of the "couple penalty" and how it has changed in recent years.
This project uses the Labour Force Survey, the Family Resources Survey and TAXBEN, the IFS's tax and benefit simulation model to analyse the interaction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) with the tax and benefit system.
Tax Credits
The increasing similarity of Income Tax and National Insurance highlights the potential benefits of amalgamating them: transparency and administrative efficiency.
The study aims to quantify the relationship between ethnicity and labour market outcomes, especially employment entry and benefit exit, for Jobcentre Plus overall and for its programmes and mainstream services. It will also investigate the relative impact in terms of ethnic parity of different Jobcentre Plus programmes.
This project asks who benefits from Child Benefit.
The objective of this project is to evaluate a forthcoming pilot scheme for reforms to incapacity benefit.
This project will investigate whether recent tax credit reforms in the UK are taking us towards a more optimal tax system, and what recent reforms might tell us about the UK Government’s desire to redistribute to the poor.
The introduction of independent taxation of married couples' incomes in 1990 left much unfinished business for capital gains tax, inheritance tax and even income tax, especially in relation to settlements.
This work examines in some detail the Department’s new pension simulation model looking at the assumptions that underpin the model and considering how it might be improved.
This research, which is performed in cooperation with the IMF, provides an analysis of the Russian income tax reform of 2001. This reform introduced a flat-rate income tax system. We analyse both its effects on labour supply and on tax compliance.
Participation of IFS staff in the ongoing project on International Social Security run by the National Bureau of Economic Research
The aim of the project is to exploit very large and comprehensive new Swedish datasets to evaluate the effects of the Swedish Active Labour Market Programmes (ALMPs) for the unemployed on a variety of labour market outcomes of participants.
This work updates earlier research looking at the proposals for the Pension Credit.
Fiscal Facts is a collection of tables and desciptive papers about the tax and benefit system and the public finances. Funded by the ESRC Centre for Public Plicy at IFS, the documentation is available online as a free resource and is updated every year in line with Budgetary changes.
PEUK is a forum for UK-based academic economists and policy makers interested in the broad area of applied theoretical and empirical analysis of public policy to meet and to exchange ideas.
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