We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disavantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of parents' material and time...

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...

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,...

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....

We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

This paper estimates the marginal efficiency cost of redistribution (MECR) associated with a demogrant and an in-work benefit for the UK since 1979, taking account of extensive as well as intensive labour supply responses. The principal methodological advance in the paper is its greater...

The UK's Labour Government has expanded means-testing of social security but attempted to do so while minimising the disincentive effects typically associated with such an approach. We test whether it has succeeded by reviewing the effect of 5 years of reforms on a range of incentives across the...

The principal of horizontal equity can be interpreted as requiring that households with the same pre-transfer incomes and the same consumption needs should receive the same post-transfer incomes. We argue the generosity of government financial support to families with children should be analysed...

This paper uses the first twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2002 to investigate single women's labour supply changes in response to three tax and benefit policy reforms that occurred in the 1990s. We find evidence of small labour supply effects for two...