Despite the rapid expansion and increasing importance of private education in developing countries, very little is known about the impact of studying in private schools on educational attainment and wages. This paper contributes to fi…lling this gap by estimating the returns to private high schools in Mexico.

The aim of this report is to provide evidence on the impact of local labour market conditions in general - and the national minimum wage (NMW) in particular - on the education and labour market choices of young people in the UK.

The Government has an ambition to increase the income tax personal allowance to £10,000 by the end of this Parliament. James Browne investigates how much it would cost the Government to reach this ambition, who would benefit and what the economic impact might be.

Concern that too little saving is done by a significant number of UK households has long been a motivation for government policy. However, any intervention by policy makers designed to increase household saving rates should ideally be based on high quality evidence on the efficacy of different policies. A new British Academy policy centre report authored by IFS researchers examines the evidence for different types of policy to promote household savings: financial incentives, education, 'nudges' and social marketing. Despite the obvious importance attached to the issue in the UK and internationally, the report concludes that significant gaps in the evidence base remain.

This report looks at evidence on policies to encourage household saving. The report examines in detail what is known - and what is not known - about the effectiveness of four types of intervention designed to raise saving by households: financial incentives; education; choice architecture; and social marketing.

This week, debate over the Government's Welfare Reform Bill has returned to the House of Commons. An element that has grabbed a lot of attention is the proposed benefit cap for working-age households (excluding those claiming Disability Living Allowance or Working Tax Credit), which will be set at £350 per week for childless single people and £500 per week for other households. This is now expected to affect about 67,000 households in Great Britain when implemented in 2013-14, reducing their benefit entitlement by an average of £83 per week and cutting the benefits bill by about £290 million in that year.

We provide a number of contributions of policy, practical and methodological interest to the study of the returns to educational qualifications in the presence of misreporting.

In this Briefing Note, we produce new estimates of the likely cuts to overall public spending on education in the UK up to 2014-15.

In new figures released today, IFS researchers estimate that total public spending on education in the UK will fall by over 13% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2014-15.

In this paper, we estimate the separate impacts of tuition fees and maintenance grants on the decision to enter university in the UK.