Although tax relief on pensions is a controversial area of government expenditure, this is the first study of the tax effects for a real world defined benefit pension scheme. First, we estimate the tax and national insurance contribution (NIC) effects of the scheme's change from final salary to...

Despite the enormous gains in the economic well-being of the elderly, and the progressivity of the Social Security benefit schedule, there remains substantial inequality in financial resources. In this paper we use data from the Health and Retirement Survey to examine the distribution of pension...

This report is designed to provide new evidence on retirement patterns in the UK, as part of the Pensions Review, a larger project run by the IFS in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, which is examining the future of financial security in retirement. Understanding patterns of...

The tax system treats funds that remain in a pension at death extremely favourably. Where an individual dies before age 75, funds remaining in their pension escape income tax entirely - there was income tax relief when the money was paid into the pension and no income tax when the money is taken...

There have been widespread concerns about the patterns of retirement saving amongst self-employed workers, who now make up just over one in eight of the whole labour force. Most strikingly, the fraction of self-employed workers earning over £10,000 who are making contributions to a private...

Despite the enormous gains in the economic well-being of the elderly, and the progressivity of the Social Security benefit schedule, there remains substantial inequality in financial resources. In this paper we use data from the Health and Retirement Survey to examine the distribution of pension...