The government has published the provisional Local Government Finance Settlement for 2025–26, setting out funding allocations for English councils next year. This confirms an important shift in grant ...

Funding for pupils with special educational needs in England increased by 59% or £4 billion between 2015 and 2024. A further £1 billion announced in the recent Budget will take total funding to £12 ...

Today, we’re turning our attention to France, where a recent Budget has sparked intense debate and raised major questions about the country’s economic future. France is tackling some big economic ...

The UK’s housing market has long been a source of frustration for renters and homeowners alike, with issues of affordability and availability topping the agenda. The new government has identified ...

We are recognised as a global centre of excellence and have been granted official ESRC Research Institute status. The Research Centre at the heart of IFS is the CPP.

This paper studies tax evasion and the contribution-benefit link in the context of maternity benefits in Hungary. Earnings and employment patterns suggest pre-pregnancy underreporting, followed by ...

The government yesterday announced a £2-billion injection of funding into England’s early years system. The vast majority of this increase is in line with plans set out at the March 2023 Budget, to ...

This paper develops a novel method for policy choice in a dynamic setting where the available data is a multi-variate time series. Building on the statistical treatment choice framework, we propose ...

We consider estimation and inference for a regression coefficient in panels with interactive fixed effects (i.e., with a factor structure). We demonstrate that existing estimators and confidence ...

In UK data, I document the prevalence of misbeliefs regarding the State Pension eligibility age (SPA) and these misbeliefs predictivity of retirement. Exploiting policy variation, I estimate a ...

The persuasion rate is a key parameter for measuring the causal effect of a directional message on influencing the recipient’s behavior. Its identification has relied on exogenous treatment or the ...

The government’s recent ‘Get Britain Working’ white paper restated their ambitious target to get 80% of 16-64-year-olds into work. According to official statistics, around 75% of 16-64-year-olds are ...