Working age benefits

This paper looks at different labour market outcomes for Ethnic Minority benefit claimants and otherwise identical Whites.

This Briefing Note examines what proportion of families have pre-tax private incomes exceeding net support from the state.

This report provides a description and quantitative analysis of the financial support for children that families in Northern Ireland (NI) receive from the government compared with the rest of the United Kingdom, and of how this has changed since 1997.

We derive distributional effects for a non-cooperative alternative to the unitary model of household behaviour.

This Briefing Note compares five recent studies that have examined the labour market impact of the Working Families' Tax Credit and related reforms between 1999 and 2002.

A review of the Labour Government's success in improving the financial reward to work for low-income families.

This Briefing Note provides the first published estimates of the labour market impact of the new tax credits, and the tax and benefit reforms that precededthem, on families with children.

This paper studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support.

We examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare

This paper provides new evidence on the substitutability between private and pension wealth by exploiting the Italian pension reform of 1992.

An additional 100,000 children were lifted out of poverty on the most commonly cited of the government's relative poverty measures between 2000ְ1 and 2001ְ2. The most recent figures show 3.8 million children (roughly 30 per cent of all children) in Britain in households with income below 60 per cent of the median income after housing costs. Although this means that almost one in three children in Britain live in poverty on this definition, this is the lowest level recorded since 1991. Since the Labour government came to power, the total drop in the numbers in child poverty has been around 500,000.

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children.

Before the 2001 election the Treasury said that `tax and benefit reforms announced in this Parliament will lift over 1.2 million children out of relative poverty. But official figures released on 11 April show a smaller fall in child poverty, of only 0.5 million since 1996-97. This commentary attempts to explain the discrepancy.