Owner-managed businesses are a fast growing group; how they respond to tax is central to the challenge of how to tax labour relative to capital incomes. We use newly linked UK tax records to estimate how personal taxes affect the real economic activity and tax avoidance of company...

We analyse the pattern of work and other labour market states, such as unemployment and out-of-labour-force, over the life course, by making use of a long retrospective panel of older Europeans. Based on stochastic simulations of a reduced form transition probability model, we document to what...

The combination of credit constraints and indivisible consumption goods may induce some riskaverse individuals to play lotteries to have a chance of crossing a purchasing threshold. One implication of this is that income effects for individuals who choose to play lotteries are likely to be...

Public spending in the UK in 2008/9 amounted to over £10,000 per person or about 43% of national income (Crawford, Emmerson and Tetlow 2009) while net receipts from tax and social security contributions exceeded £8,000 per person or about 35% of national income. These transfers of resources...

The paper examines how individuals respond to complex decision-making environments - in particular, whether up-front financial incentives are an effective policy lever to change behaviour. The paper argues that incentives differ in their transparency and in their complexity; individuals are more...

We study optimal corrective taxation in the alcohol market. Consumption generates negative externalities that are non-linear in the total amount of alcohol consumed. If tastes for products are heterogeneous and correlated with marginal externalities, then varying tax rates on different products...

Despite some convergence, the gender pay gap remains large. In this study, we use BHPS-USoc data to document the evolution of the gender pay gap in the UK over the past 25 years and its association with fertility. We also investigate the potential role of various differences in career patterns...

The Hamilton method for estimating CPI bias is simple, intuitive, and has been widely adopted. We show that the method conflates CPI bias with variation in cost-of-living across income levels. Assuming a single price index across the income distribution is inconsistent with the downward sloping...

Fundraising interventions may lift donations and/or shift their composition and timing, making it important to study their effect across charity space and time. We find that major fundraising appeals lift total donations, but surprisingly shift donations to other charities across time. To...

Each year the UK records 25,000 or more excess winter deaths, primarily among the elderly. A key policy response is the “Winter Fuel Payment” (WFP), a labelled but unconditional cash transfer to households with a member above the Female State Pension Age. The WFP has been shown to raise fuel...