This paper examines the tax schedule for low income families with children. We take an optimal tax approach based on a structural labour supply model which incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system....

We derive robust predictions on the effects of uncertainty on short run investment dynamics in a broad class of models with (partial) irreversibility. When their environment becomes more uncertain firms become more cautious and less responsive to demand shocks. This result contrasts with the...

Income Tax and National Insurance are now sufficiently similar that merging them appears to be a plausible option, yet still sufficiently different that integration raises significant difficulties. This paper surveys the potential benefits of integration – increased transparency and reduced...

We apply a new estimator to the measurement of the economic returns to education. We control for endogenous education, unobserved ability and measurement error using only the natural heteroscedasticty of wages and education attainment. Our prefered estimate, 6.07%, is closer to the OLS estimate...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...