Fiscal Studies最新文献

Wealth surveys that collect information on intergenerational transfers provide new scope for comparative study of those transfers and their relationship with wealth across rich countries. However, this is problematic in the case of Great Britain, due to specific features of the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS), the central source of survey-based household wealth data, in particular the extent of missing information in its first wave. This has severely constrained efforts to investigate patterns of wealth transfer in Great Britain in comparative perspective. In this paper, we set out these issues and present ways of dealing with them. On this basis, we then examine the main similarities and differences in patterns of intergenerational transmission of wealth between Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States. Our findings reveal common features across these countries as well as some important respects in which Great Britain was distinctive, though less of an outlier than the US. About 35 per cent of British households reported receiving an intergenerational wealth transfer at some point, similar to most of the comparator countries but much higher than the US. We conclude by setting out how WAS can be enhanced to address these issues at source, proposals with which the Office for National Statistics is seriously engaged.

The share of home-cooked food in the diet of UK households declined from the 1980s. This was contemporaneous with a decline in the market price of ingredients for home cooking relative to ready-to-eat foods. We consider a simple model of food consumption and time use that captures the key driving forces behind these apparently conflicting trends. We show that observed behaviour can be rationalised by the fact that the shadow price of home-cooked food, which accounts for the fact that cooking takes time, has risen relative to the price of ready-to-eat food, due to the increase in the market value of time of secondary earners. We discuss the implications for policies that aim to encourage healthier diets.

As of March 2022, Ingvild Almås, Timothy Beatty, John Creedy, Mariacristina De Nardi, Guyonne Kalb, Clare Leaver and Helen Simpson have stepped down from the Editorial Board of Fiscal Studies. James Cloyne, Monica Costa Dias, Matthias Parey and James Ziliak would like to thank them for their enormous contributions to the journal. The Editors are pleased to welcome Anne Brockmeyer, Eric French, Sonya Krutikova, Peter Levell, Eric Ohrn, Emma Tominey and Mazhar Waseem to join the Board of Associate Editors at Fiscal Studies.

We are pleased to welcome the two new managing editors of Fiscal Studies, James Banks (Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester, Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Co-Principal Investigator of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing) and Kimberley Scharf (Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Birmingham and Director of the NAO – University of Birmingham Tax Centre).

Professor Banks's research focuses on the empirical modelling of individual economic behaviour over the life cycle, with particular focus on the dynamics of consumption, savings and retirement; and broad issues on the economics of ageing, including the study of health and cognitive functioning, and their association with labour market and broader socio-economic status. Professor Scharf's research interests include the economics of charitable giving, fundraising and philanthropy; taxation and public finance; international taxation; and political economy.

In this paper, we analyse the impact of the implementation of a child tax credit in Austria in 2018. We combine microsimulation techniques, labour supply modelling and dynamic general equilibrium modelling to make an ex ante evaluation of the reform, accounting also for behavioural responses of individuals. We show that although the macroeconomic effect of the Austrian reform is expected to be relatively small, accounting for feedback effects on a micro-level is very important, especially when analysing socioeconomic and policy-relevant indicators, such as poverty and inequality. When focusing on the distributional implications and the impact on poverty, our analysis highlights that the first-round effects of the child tax credit substantially underestimate the increase in household income for households with children. Additionally, we find that when accounting for second-round effects, the loss in tax revenues is partly offset. The estimated self-financing effect of the reform is estimated to be about 13 per cent. Our results also indicate that part of the associated tax decrease can be potentially captured by the employer, meaning that gross wages are expected to fall slightly. Therefore, in the medium term, some households without children might suffer a small reduction in their disposable income. Overall, our analysis highlights the importance of accounting for second-round effects when analysing tax reforms ex ante.

After an economically tough start to the new millennium, Germany experienced an unprecedented employment boom after 2005, only stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Persistently high levels of inequality despite a booming labour market and drastically falling unemployment rates constituted a puzzle, suggesting either that the German job miracle mainly benefitted individuals in the mid- or high-income range or that other developments offset the effects of the drastically improved labour market conditions. The present paper solves this puzzle by breaking down the observed changes in the distribution of disposable incomes between 2005–06 and 2015–16 into the contributions of eight different factors, one of them being the employment boom. Our results suggest that, while the latter did have an equalising impact, it was partially offset by the disequalising impact of other factors, and substantially dampened by the transfer system. Our results point to a strong role of the German transfer system as a distributional stabiliser implying that, if the COVID-19 shock were to persistently reverse all the employment gains that occurred during the boom, this would only have a moderately disequalising effect on the distribution of net incomes.

There is a prevailing popular belief that expenditure on management by health-care providers is wasteful, diverts resources from patient care, and distracts medical and nursing staff from getting on with their jobs. There is little existing evidence to support either this narrative or counter-claims. We explore the relationship between management and public sector hospital performance using a fixed effects empirical econometric specification on a panel data set consisting of all 129 non-specialist acute National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in England for the financial years 2012/13 to 2018/19. Measures of managerial input and quality of management practice are constructed from NHS Electronic Staff Records and NHS Staff Survey data. Hospital accounts and Hospital Episode Statistics data are used to construct five measures of financial performance and of timely and high-quality care. We find no evidence of association either between quantity of management and management quality or directly between quantity of management and any of our measures of hospital performance. However, there is some evidence that higher-quality management is associated with better performance. NHS managers have limited discretion in performing their managerial functions, being tightly circumscribed by official guidance, targets, and other factors outside their control. Given these constraints, our findings are unsurprising.

In this paper, I examine the role of a wealth tax in the context of the UK's existing taxes on wealth. First, I discuss several ways in which the UK could be said to tax wealth already, and I set out two possible directions for reforming these taxes, highlighting policies that are merited under either approach. Second, I consider whether and under what circumstances a broad-based tax on the ownership of wealth – a ‘wealth tax’ – could be justified instead of or in addition to these reforms. Third, I address how a wealth tax should interact with other taxes, focusing on concerns regarding ‘double taxation’ and (conversely) proposals for an alternative minimum tax based on wealth. I conclude that there is a large degree of consensus amongst existing proposals to reform our current taxes on wealth, and that most of these reforms would be required whether or not a wealth tax is introduced as well.

In this paper, we model the revenue that could be raised from an annual and a one-off wealth tax of the design recommended by Advani, Chamberlain and Summers in the Wealth Tax Commission's Final Report (2020). We examine the distributional effects of the tax, in terms of both wealth and other characteristics. We also estimate the share of taxpayers who would face liquidity constraints in meeting their tax liability. We find that an annual wealth tax charging 0.17 per cent on wealth above £500,000 could generate £10 billion in revenue, before administrative costs. Alternatively, a one-off tax charging 4.8 per cent (effectively 0.95 per cent per year, paid over a five-year period) on wealth above the same threshold, would generate £250 billion in revenue. To put our revenue estimates into context, we present revenue estimates and costings for some commonly proposed reforms to the existing set of taxes on capital.