Proposed tax and benefit changes: winners and losers in the next term

This Election Briefing Note shows how the tax and benefit reforms proposed by the three main UK parties would affect government revenues and the incomes of different groups in the population. It also shows how the changes to taxes and benefits already announced by the government and due to come into effect between May 2005 and April 2009 will affect household incomes

Take-up of family credit and working families' tax credit: final report

The current government has substantially increased the use of means-tested tax and benefit programmes to try to help people on low incomes. An important early example of this was the replacement in October 1999 of Family Credit (FC), a benefit providing support for low-income working parents, by Working Families' Tax Credit (WFTC). WFTC was delivered differently from FC, it was described as a tax credit rather than a benefit, and it was also much more generous than its predecessor. However, the efficacy of using means-testing to help people on low incomes is limited by the fact that many of the people eligible for means-tested programmes do not take them up. Because of this, one of the government's stated aims when introducing WFTC was to encourage take-up, arguing that as a tax credit rather than a welfare benefit, it will reduce the stigma associated with claiming in-work support, and encourage higher take-up. In this paper we try to answer the question of whether the replacement of FC by WFTC did indeed encourage take-up. We also try and identify more generally what factors are important in explaining non-take-up of FC and WFTC, in particular quantifying the effect of entitlement level and examining the effects of people's knowledge of, and attitudes towards, in-work support. Our approach is an econometric one, investigating the relationship between take-up of FC/WFTC and a variety of explanatory variables in two micro-data-sets, the Family Resources Survey (FRS) and the Families and Children Survey (FACS)

The 10% tax rate: where next?

In Budget 2007, the Government announced the abolition of the 10% starting rate of income tax alongside a wider set of reforms to personal taxes and tax credits to take effect during the period April 2008 to April 2010. Further changes to tax credits and state benefits were announced in PBR 2007 and Budget 2008, some to take effect in 2008-09, some in 2009-10 and others in 2010-11. During April 2008, the Government said that it was looking at ways of compensating the net losers from these changes (in practice, those for whom the losses from the abolition of the 10% band exceeded the gains from the other measures). On 13 May it announced a £600 rise in the income tax personal allowance for 2008-09, with a corresponding cut in the higher-rate threshold. In the light of these changes, this note looks at: * To what extent the rise in the personal allowance, and other measures in Budget 2007, PBR 2007 and Budget 2008, compensate those who lost out from the abolition of the 10% rate of income tax; * To what extent the Government's pre-announced changes to personal taxes, tax credits and benefits for 2010-11 provide compensation for these losers over the medium term; * What options the Government has for 2009-10 and beyond

The benefits of parenting: Government financial support for families with children since 1975

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children

Tax and benefit changes: who wins and who loses?

* Tax and benefit changes implemented by Labour since 1997 will have a net cost to the exchequer of around £2.2 billion in 2005-06. The average (mean) impact of this small net giveaway is to raise household disposable incomes by £1.69 a week or 0.4%. The biggest proportionate gains are in the 2nd poorest tenth of the population, whose disposable incomes are increased by 11.4%, while the richest tenth fare worst, with a cut in income of 3.7%. * Tax and benefit reforms since 1997 have clearly been progressive, benefiting the less well-off relative to the better-off. Reforms in the second term - while less generous on average - were more progressive than those in the first, with the poorest faring better. * Increases in council tax above inflation since 1997 will raise £5.8 billion in 2005-06, net of council tax benefit. This outweighs the giveaway by central government, and leaves households overall £2.85 a week worse off on average, equivalent to 0.6% of their disposable incomes. The increase in council tax is regressive, except for the poorest fifth of the population, who are partially protected from the rises by council tax benefit

Financial work incentives in Britain: comparisons over time and between family types

This paper reviews various techniques for quantifying financial incentives to work, shows how financial work incentives have changed across the population since 1979, and estimates how much of these changes are due to changes in the tax and benefit system

Financial work incentives in Britain: comparisons over time and between family types

This paper reviews various techniques for quantifying financial incentives to work, shows how financial work incentives have changed across the population since 1979, and estimates how much of these changes are due to changes in the tax and benefit system.

A Manager’s Guide to Free Speech and Social Media in the Public Workplace: An Analysis of the Lower Courts’ Recent Application of Pickering

The article provides a unique focus on the increasingly relevant public personnel issue of employee personal-use social media and the negative implications on workplace efficiency faced by current public managers. Public employees uniquely have free speech rights—within the context of their employement—not held by their private sector counterparts. The jurisprudence on these rights is well established with the development of the Pickering balancing test by the US Supreme Court. However, cases in the lower courts involving speech and social media and the implications of these decisions on public agencies and public managers are not well understood or explored in the public personnel literature. This study explicitly addressed this gap and provides the public manager with guidance on the matter

Reducing Pausing at Rich-to-Lean Schedule Transitions: Effects of Variable-Ratio Schedules and Noncontingent Timeouts

Transitions from relatively rich to lean conditions of reinforcement often produce extended pausing because this transition is relatively more aversive than other transition types (e.g., rich-rich, lean-lean, and lean-rich). In applied settings, aversive rich-lean transitions may underlie maladaptive aberrant behavior (e.g., self-injury, aggression, and severe stereotypy). Reducing the aversiveness of this critical transition is of basic and applied interest. The length of the pause may be used as an index of the aversive stimulation at rich-lean transitions and as an analog measure of aberrant behavior in clinical settings. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of arranging rich-lean transitions between variable-ratio (VR) schedules or random-ratio (RR) schedules on pausing at rich-lean transitions in four pigeons. Variable- and random-ratio schedules were equally effective at reducing pausing at rich-lean transitions. These results suggest that the aversive stimulation at rich-lean transitions was reduced with variable schedules. The applied implication is that aberrant behavior should be less likely to occur at rich-lean transitions when variable schedules are arranged. In Experiment 2, four transitions were separated by a timeout period imposed between the end of the reinforcer and before the start of the next multiple-schedule component. During the timeout, the response key was darkened and the reinforcement schedule was suspended until the timeout interval had elapsed. Across different timeout durations, ratio sizes, and probes, the timeout produced inconsistent within- and between-subject results. Inconsistent results may be attributable to the timeout reducing the number of transitions completed, performance failing to meet the quantitative and qualitative stability criteria, and insufficient reinforcement in the lean-schedule component. An interesting possibility raised by Experiment 2 is that the multiple schedule may have "chain-like" features (e.g., access to a rich-schedule component), which may maintain responding in the lean component when there is insufficient reinforcement