Policy-makers have increasingly turned to ‘in-work transfers’ to boost incomes among poorer workers and strengthen work incentives. One attraction of these is that labour supply elasticities are typically greatest at the extensive margin. Because in-work transfers are normally subject to...

In April, the UK entered the second year of a six-year freeze in the cash value of income tax thresholds - a policy set to become the single biggest tax-raising measure since the 1970s. This is the latest in a long line of measures (by successive governments) that have hugely increased the scope...

The introduction of universal credit (UC) has been the most significant reform to the workingage benefits system since the reforms following the post-war Beveridge Report. When fully rolled out, around 8 million families - 29% of all working-age families - will be entitled to the benefit. UC is...

Time-limited in-work credits are cheaper, and more targeted, than conventional in-work credits, but are thought to have small to zero long-term impacts. We study two time-limited in-work credits in- troduced in the mid-2000s in the UK and find they reduced welfare participation and increased...

In 1995, the UK government legislated to increase the earliest age at which women could claim a state pension from 60 to 65 between April 2010 and March 2020. This paper uses data from the first two years of this change coming into effect to estimate the impact of increasing the state pension...

In a previous study we examined the impact on employment of increasing the state pension age for women from age 60 to 61 (Cribb, Emmerson and Tetlow, 2013). This short paper incorporates more recent data, now available up to March 2014, which allows us to study the impact on employment over the...

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...