Redistribution, work incentives and thirty years of UK tax and benefit reform

Governments wishing to reduce inequality by redistributing money from the rich to the poor face the dilemma that in doing so (by increasing tax rates and means-tested benefits, for example) they reduce the incentive for individuals to increase their incomes. Policy-makers have tried to balance these objectives in different ways and, partly as a result of this, the tax and benefit system today is very different from the one that existed thirty years ago. In this paper we look at how the tax and benefit system redistributed income and affected incentives to work in 2009-10, and at the effect of tax and benefit reforms between 1978-79 and 2009-10 on the level of inequality and work incentives.tax, benefits, work incentives

Fitting multilevel multivariate models with missing data in responses and covariates that may include interactions and non-linear terms

The paper extends existing models for multilevel multivariate data with mixed response types to handle quite general types and patterns of missing data values in a wide range of multilevel generalized linear models. It proposes an efficient Bayesian modelling approach that allows missing values in covariates, including models where there are interactions or other functions of covariates such as polynomials. The procedure can also be used to produce multiply imputed complete data sets. A simulation study is presented as well as the analysis of a longitudinal data set. The paper also shows how existing multiprocess models for handling endogeneity can be extended by the framework proposed

Child poverty in the UK since 1998-99: lessons from the past decade

As a result of the Child Poverty Act (2010), current and future governments are committed to reducing the rate of relative income child poverty in the UK to 10% by 2020-21. This paper looks in detail at the progress made towards this goal under the previous Labour administrations. Direct tax and benefit reforms are very important in explaining at least three things: the large overall reduction in child poverty since 1998-99; the striking slowdown in progress towards the child poverty targets between 2004-05 and 2007-08; and some of the variation in child poverty trends between different groups of children. However, some of the child poverty-reducing impact of those reforms acted simply to stop child poverty rising as real earnings grew over the period, which increases median income and thus the relative poverty line. The performance of parents in the labour market is important too: between regions, parental employment and child poverty trends are closely related; the overall reduction in child poverty since 1998-99 has been helped by higher lone parent employment rates; and the overall rise in child poverty since 2004-05 has been most concentrated on children of one-earner couples, whose real earnings have fallen.

DEVELOPMENT OF EQUIPMENT AND METHODOLOGY FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF UNDERWATER SOUND PRODUCED BY DEEP FOUNDATION CONSTRUCTION

Until the last decade, the underwater sound produced during marine pile driving and underwater drilling work was not considered a hazard to marine life. However, beginning with state environmental agencies on the West Coast, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service has taken a national interest in this possible source of environmental disturbance to endangered species and marine mammals. Under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act and the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, “taking” of endangered species or marine mammals includes activities that could cause physical harm, harassment, or behavioral modification of a protected species. High intensity sound produced by construction activities can meet these legal standards of a “taking”. Many northern New England rivers and coastal areas are known habitats for endangered fish species and marine mammals. In response, NOAA NMFS has added recently-developed limits on sound energy produced by construction activities to its permits for new bridges and coastal infrastructure in locations considered a habitat for protected species. The equipment and methodologies to determine compliance to sound limits are generally unknown to the construction and civil engineering industry in New England. The University of New Hampshire Department of Civil Engineering was approached by regional DOT’s and contractors to develop an approach to meet these monitoring requirements. Several types of hydrophone equipment and data analysis methods were evaluated to assist regional DOT’s and contractors with accurately meeting the monitoring requirements on several projects. The goal of this research was to develop a means to accurately meet project noise monitoring specifications while ensuring that projects were not unduly impacted by inaccurate or unreasonable analysis of the acquired data. Over the course of several years and a handful of pile driving and foundation drilling projects, regional expertise was demonstrated in this complex and emerging area of regulatory compliance. Several critical areas for future research were identified to provide owners and contractors with methods to predict possible impacts during the design and planning phases of a project and reduce project risk

High Performance Work Strategies: Empowerment Or Repression For The Working Class?

A brief overview of work organization from pre-industrial times to today is presented.  The importance of lean production and just-in-time inventory (JIT) as high performance work organization techniques in manufacturing assembly operations is highlighted as important business strategies for firms competing in the global auto industry.  Lean production and JIT strategies, when properly implemented, positively impact the need for manufacturing flexibility and customer demands for high quality and short delivery time.  However, there is growing concern that these strategies are having an unintended and negative impact on worker well being.  Recent empirical work on the lean production and JIT in auto assembly plants is presented in light of its impact on workers.  In addition, an assessment is made as to whether these strategies empower or repress members of today's working class.            &nbsp

Tile Pattern KL-Divergence for Analysing and Evolving Game Levels

This paper provides a detailed investigation of using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence as a way to compare and analyse game-levels, and hence to use the measure as the objective function of an evolutionary algorithm to evolve new levels. We describe the benefits of its asymmetry for level analysis and demonstrate how (not surprisingly) the quality of the results depends on the features used. Here we use tile-patterns of various sizes as features. When using the measure for evolution-based level generation, we demonstrate that the choice of variation operator is critical in order to provide an efficient search process, and introduce a novel convolutional mutation operator to facilitate this. We compare the results with alternative generators, including evolving in the latent space of generative adversarial networks, and Wave Function Collapse. The results clearly show the proposed method to provide competitive performance, providing reasonable quality results with very fast training and reasonably fast generation.Comment: 8 pages plus references. Proceedings of GECCO 201

Individualization and Equality:Women’s careers and organizational form

Some feminist writings have claimed that ‘bureaucracy’ is inherently ‘patriarchal’. This paper challenges this argument by comparing the experience of women in Ireland in a state sector organization and in a cluster of software firms. While the bureaucratic state company has been reformed to incorporate equal opportunities, in the individualised or ‘marketized’ software companies women’s progress is at the whim of individual managers and motherhood and a career are largely incompatible. If bureaucratic organizations can be reformed in this way, it cannot be claimed that there is any inherent link between bureaucracy and patriarchy. Instead organizations can be either bureaucratic or marketized, and either patriarchal or woman-friendly. These are two separate dimensions which change independently of each other. On this basis the paper suggests that the contemporary ‘remasculinization’ of management occurs because earlier reforms in bureaucratic organizations are now being eroded.

The impact of a time-limited, targeted in-work benefit in the medium-term: an evaluation of In Work Credit

Conventional in-work benefits or tax credits are now well established as a policy instrument for increasing labour supply and tackling poverty. A different sort of in-work credit is one where the payments are time-limited, conditional on previous receipt of welfare, and, perhaps, not means-tested. Such a design is cheaper, and perhaps better targeted, but potentially less effective. Using administrative data, this paper evaluates one such policy for lone parents in the UK which was piloted in around one third of the country. It finds that the policy did increase flows off welfare and into work, and that these positive effects did not diminish after recipients reached the 12 month time-limit for receiving the supplement. Most of the impact arose by speeding up welfare off-flows: the job retention of programme recipients was good, but this cannot be attributed to the programme itself.In-work benefits, labour supply, time-limits, welfare, lone parents.