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

The impact of the UK government's tax, welfare and minimum wage reforms in Wales

The UK government's proposed package of tax and benefit changes (those announced in fiscal events up to and including the July Budget) to be introduced between 2015-16 and 2019-20 will reduce the incomes of households in Wales by £459 a year on average (an aggregate loss of around £600 million). This is roughly the same in cash terms as the average for the UK as a whole, but since average incomes in Wales are below the UK average, this represents a larger percentage of net income. Reductions in income will not be evenly felt across different types of household. Lower-income households, particularly those with children will lose considerably more than this amount on average. Better-off households and pensioners will be less affected or even gain from these changes. Low-income working households lose roughly the same as low-income non-working households on average. However, this will change following the introduction of universal credit as universal credit benefits some working households, in particular single-earner couples, but reduces the incomes of some non-working households. Cuts to out-of-work benefits will modestly strengthen work incentives onaverage. Two summary measures of the incentives for people to be in paid work, the participation tax rate and the replacement rate, both fall by 2.2 percentage points (ppts) on average, the average participation tax rate from 36.1% to 34.0% and the average replacement rate from 55.5% to 53.3%. Given the scale of the benefit cuts, this is perhaps a smaller impact than one might have expected. A key explanation for the limited effect these policies have on work incentives is the significant planned cuts to in-work support. Indeed, benefit changes other than universal credit increase average participation tax rates for those groups who are more likely to receive in-work support, namely lone parents and those whose partner is not in paid work. Universal credit also strengthens work incentives on average, but in many ways has the opposite effect to other benefit changes, as it particularly strengthens work incentives for those who have a partner who is not in paid work. However,neither universal credit nor other benefit changes significantly strengthen work incentives for lone parents. Tax and benefit changes to be introduced over the next four years on average strengthen the incentive for those in paid work to increase their earnings. [...

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

The impact of proposed tax, benefit and minimum wage reforms on household incomes and work incentives

The UK government's proposed package of tax and benefit changes to be introduced between 2015-16 and 2019-20 (those announced in fiscal events up to and including the July Budget) will reduce household incomes by £455 a year on average. However, this average figure disguises considerable variation across the population. The biggest losers from these changes will be low-income households with children. Better-off households and pensioners will be less affected, or even gain from these changes. Low-income working households lose roughly the same as low-income non-working households from changes to the existing benefit system on average. However, this will change following the introduction of universal credit, as universal credit benefits some working households, in particular single-earner couples, but reduces the incomes of some non-working households. Cuts to out-of-work benefits will modestly strengthen work incentives on average. Two summary measures of the incentives for people to be in paid work, the participation tax rate and the replacement rate, fall by 2.5 percentage points(ppts) and 2.2ppts respectively. This is perhaps a smaller reduction than one might have expected given the scale of the benefit cuts. A key explanation for the limited effect these policies have on work incentives is the significant planned cuts to in-work support. Indeed, benefit changes other than universal credit increase participation tax rates for around 6.7 million people, and increase average participation tax rates among those groups who are more likely to receive tax credits while in paid work including lone parents and those whose partner is not in paid work. This arises because, for these individuals, in-work support is being cut by more than out-of-work benefits. Universal credit also strengthens work incentives on average, but in many ways has the opposite effect to other benefit changes. Whereas other benefit changes strengthen work incentives for those with a working partner but weaken them for those whose partner does not work, because universal credit increases the amount of support given to single-earner couples, it particularly strengthens work incentives for those whose partner is not in paid work. However, neither universal credit nor other benefit changes significantly strengthen work incentives for lone parents. [...

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

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.

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