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...

How should pensions be taxed? We propose income tax and National Insurance reforms that would more evenly support pension saving. Pensions are the biggest component of household wealth and are treated favourably by the tax system. That means getting pensions tax design right matters. It matters...

Both academic and political debates over the minimum wage generally focus on the minimum wage rate. However, the minimum wage is a complex institution composed of a wide variety of parameters. In this note, I show that nominal rates provide a very crude picture of minimal compensation and of...

During the last 10 years, many OECD countries introduced reforms which included automatic enrolment or mandatory participation in privately managed pension schemes. The current article aims to reveal the benefits and costs of privately managed pension schemes. The article uses a study of pension...

We examine whether salary transparency influences gender pay inequality in the context of Canadian universities by exploiting a policy change enacted in one Canadian province that required salary disclosure through a publicly searchable database, thus lowering the cost of monitoring the gender...

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are...