Documents Blundell, Richard 6 results

"We consider the impact of tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We analyze both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion and savings, we quantify the insurance value of alternative programs. We find important incentive effects on education choice and labor supply, with single mothers having the most elastic labor supply. Returns to labor market experience are found to be substantial but only for full-time employment, and especially for women with more than basic formal education. For those with lower education the welfare programs are shown to have substantial insurance value. Based on the model, marginal increases to tax credits are preferred to equally costly increases in income support and to tax cuts, except by those in the highest education group."

"This paper documents the key stylised facts underlying the evolution of labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins in the last forty years in three countries: United-States, United-Kingdom and France. We develop a statistical decomposition that provides bounds on changes at the extensive and intensive margins. This decomposition is also shown to be coherent with the analysis of labour supply elasticities at these margins. We use detailed representative micro-datasets to examine the relative importance of the extensive and intensive margins in explaining the overall changes in total hours worked."

"The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supply model. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considers purely Pareto improving reforms and also optimal design under social welfare functions with different degrees of inequality aversion. We explore the gains from tagging and also examine the case for the use of hours-contingent payments. Using the tax schedule for lone parents in the UK as our policy environment, the results point to a reformed non-linear tax schedule with tax credits only optimal for low earners. The results also suggest a welfare improving role for tagging according to child age and for hours-contingent payments, although the case for the latter is mitigated when hours cannot be monitored or recorded accurately by the tax authorities. "

"We study earnings and income inequality in Britain over the past two decades, including the period of relatively ‘inclusive' growth from 1997 to 2004, and the Great Recession. We focus on the middle 90%, where trends have contrasted strongly with the ‘new inequality' at the very top. Household earnings inequality has risen, driven by male earnings -although a ‘catch-up' of female earnings did hold down individual earnings inequality and reduce within -household inequality. Nevertheless, net household income inequality fell due to deliberate increases in redistribution, the tax and transfer system's insurance role during the Great Recession, falling household worklessness, and rising pensioner incomes."

"Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to analyze the wage premium to working in an innovative firm. We find that firms that are more R&D intensive pay higher wages on average, and this is particularly true for workers in some low-skilled occupations. We propose a model in which a firm's innovativeness is reflected in the degree of complementarity between workers in low-skill and high-skilled occupations, and in which non-verifiable soft skills are an important determinant of the wages of workers in low-skilled occupations. The model yields additional predictions on training, tenure and outsourcing which we also find support for in data."

"This paper brings together evidence from various data sources and the most recent studies to describe what we know so far about the impacts of the COVID‐19 crisis on inequalities across several key domains of life, including employment and ability to earn, family life and health. We show how these new fissures interact with existing inequalities along various key dimensions, including socio‐economic status, education, age, gender, ethnicity and geography. We find that the deep underlying inequalities and policy challenges that we already had are crucial in understanding the complex impacts of the pandemic itself and our response to it, and that the crisis does in itself have the potential to exacerbate some of these pre‐existing inequalities fairly directly. Moreover, it seems likely that the current crisis will leave legacies that will impact inequalities in the long term. These possibilities are not all disequalising, but many are."