 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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The distribution of income, consumption and wealth continues to be a central area of IFS research. Amongst the many aspects of our work in this area, we seek to chart, explain, and understand changes in inequality in wages, earnings, incomes and consumption, in the UK and other countries; we also seek to examine the effectiveness of a wide range of policies aimed at reducing poverty - including taxes and benefits, and other types of policy interventions - both at home and abroad.
Our research is also concerned with the welfare implications of changes both to inequality and poverty. These depend on how far they are caused by permanent changes in the relative standings of individuals in the income distribution (e.g. a change in the return to certain skills caused by technical progress) or by changes in the frequency of short-lived events (e.g. temporary layoffs), as well as the availability to individuals of specific insurance and other mechanisms to mitigate unexpected events.
Resources and analysis relating to the 2010 Spending Review.
This theme is concerned with a variety of behaviours and activities that can potentially lead either to unfavourable or indeed enhanced outcomes for young people.
For some groups of children, the pressures on their lives stemming from within their family, their peers, or the wider community will increase the chances of taking part in risky behaviours.
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.
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.
This research will analyse existing datasets to identify the characteristics of the very poorest families, and also self-employed families. It will examine different aspects of the economic circumstances of these families, including their income, material deprivation, and other subjective measures of poverty.
This project will update the forecast of child poverty in 2010 and 2020, and set out the cost of various policies that would help the government meet its target. The project will report in time to inform Budget 2009.
By taking a life-cycle approach, starting in early childhood and moving through to compulsory schooling and beyond, this project will build a picture of the cumulative nature of educational attainment, assessing the relative importance of different factors at different stages in the lives of young people growing up in poverty.
In a project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a number of researchers at various institutions are working to forecast the prospects for child poverty in 2010 and 2020 under current government policies, and to estimate what a set of policies that allowed the government to meet the target might cost.
This project aims to explore the extent to which parental income affects smoking behaviour amongst children.
In this research we ask what differences in child development can be found between different ethnic groups.
In recognizing that it is hard to measure the relative welfare of individuals, households and countries this project so that we can understand phenomena like social exclusion, poverty etc this project will develop a method for deriving rankings which avoids the need to specify a weighting scheme.
Researchers at IFS monitor the changes in inequality across the population.
Health inequalities among the older population have important implications for a range
of policy issues as our population continues to age.
This study considers the consumption patterns amongst households in extreme poverty using a dataset covering 122 municipalities in Colombia. Looking particularly at goods such as food, education, health, house services, alcohol and tobacco, researchers will analyse the changes in relation to income, income sources and prices. In addition the research will look at how different members of the household change their patterns of consumption, especially children.
The worsening record on teenage pregnancies of both Britain and the USA relative to other countries motivates a continued interest in estimating the long-term socioeconomic consequences of teenage motherhood.
Policymakers have used the wide body of research evidence from around the world, which purports to show that children who grow up in poor families experience a wide range of negative outcomes, to justify large increases in benefits to families with children. The most commonly found justification for this approach has been that it serves to improve children's outcomes, both in childhood and later in life.
The overall aim of this project was to investigate the trends in inequality in Britain in the 1990s and beyond, looking at what can be learned both from patterns of household income and expenditure.
Researchers at IFS look child poverty on an ongoing basis, analysing the effectiveness of government policy designed to alleviate - and eventually abolish - child poverty.
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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