Value added taxes (VAT) are an important, and in many cases increasing, source of revenue in both developed and developing countries. Unsurprisingly there is an intense academic and policy debate about the appropriate VAT rate structure, for both equity and efficiency reasons. In this paper we...

Much of the focus of the UK pensions policy debate over the past decade has been on the adequacy (or otherwise) of private retirement saving. In this paper, we present the first assessment of the optimality of the retirement resources of English couple households born in the 1940s. Here,...

Anti-smoking policies can in theory make smokers better off, by helping smokers with time-inconsistent preferences commit to giving up or reducing the amount they smoke. We use almost 20 years of British individual-level panel data to explore the impact on self-reported psychological well-being...

Reforms of indirect taxes, such as the recent changes in rates of value added tax (VAT) in the Czech Republic, change prices of products and services to which households can respond by adjusting their expenditures. I estimate the behavioural response of consumers to price changes in the Czech...

This paper uses a survey-based approach to test alternative methods of channeling tax relief to donors - as a tax rebate for the donor or as a matched payment to the receiving charity. On accounting grounds these two are equivalent but, in line with earlier experimental studies, we find that...

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. Policymakers highlight the young, particularly from poor backgrounds, and high sugar consumers as groups whose behavior they would most like to influence. There are also concerns about the policy being regressive. We assess who are most...

Anti-smoking policies can in theory make smokers better off, by helping smokers with time-inconsistent preferences commit to giving up or reducing the amount they smoke. We use almost 20 years of British individual-level panel data to explore the impact on self-reported psychological well-being...

This paper uses a survey-based approach to test alternative methods of channeling tax relief to donors - as a tax rebate for the donor or as a matched payment to the receiving charity. On accounting grounds these two are equivalent but, in line with earlier experimental studies, we find that...

Reforms of indirect taxes, such as the recent changes in rates of value added tax (VAT) in the Czech Republic, change prices of products and services to which households can respond by adjusting their expenditures. I estimate the behavioural response of consumers to price changes in the Czech...

This study uses the first twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2002 to investigate the extent of constraints on desired hours of work within jobs and the degree of flexibility of the labour market for a sample of women. Our main findings are as follows....