Suchergebnisse

This document describes the UK tax and benefit system between April 1990 and April 2010, as implemented in FORTAX, a microsimulation library written in Fortran. It begins with an overview of FORTAX and the information it calculates. Subsequent sections describe the taxes and benefits implemented in FORTAX, noting where simplifications have been made. An appendix lists values of the major tax and benefit parameters over time.

This report describes a scoping study to understand more about the nature of the 'costs of compliance' that claimants of social security benefits and (personal) tax credits incur, and discusses possible ways of measuring such costs. 'Costs of compliance' refers to the costs - time, money and psychological costs - that are imposed on applicants for, and recipients of, benefits and tax credits and on others by meeting all the various requirements placed on them by social security and tax credit law and statutory authorities. Our main purpose in this report is to make the case for taking compliance costs into account in considering the impact of, and changes to, benefits and tax credits. The study aimed to investigate the extent to which the principles underlying methods of establishing 'costs of compliance' in other areas can be applied to applicants for, and recipients of, benefits and tax credits. These existing methods include valuing individuals' and companies' administrative costs of complying with the tax authorities; valuing companies' costs in complying with government regulations; and estimating the time spent by individuals in complying with government regulations of various kinds. But we also think it is important for governments to consider claimants' own perceptions and priorities in terms of the 'costs of compliance'. Currently, the government recommends that cost-benefit analysis should be used when assessing the impact of potential policy changes and it produces guidance for departments on how to put this into practice. New impact assessments have been introduced recently, which, in principle, should take into account the monetary value of all the effects of changes, including allocating a value to non-market items such as people's time. This kind of assessment should therefore include analysis of the 'costs of compliance' for benefits and tax credits claimants. In practice, however, impact assessments do not usually include such exercises. It is important to know about the scale and distribution of the compliance costs of benefits and tax credits, as well as taxes, for several reasons. Time spent by recipients fulfilling their obligations cannot be spent engaged in other activities; a more rounded measure of the productivity of the benefits and tax credits system would include such costs; and we could understand more about the reasons behind non-take-up of entitlements. There could be advantages, too, in terms of improving citizens' relationship with government. A concern about the 'burdens on citizens' imposed by their interactions with government is now moving quickly up the policy agenda in the UK, and a few attempts to measure claimants' compliance costs were initiated whilst this scoping study was being undertaken. Within the European Union, member states have also begun to exchange information and experiences about reducing burdens on citizens more generally. The Netherlands has developed both its policies and its measurement methods further than many other countries. This is a scoping study and does not set out to measure the costs of compliance incurred by benefits and tax credits claimants. Instead, it explores the nature of the costs of compliance for claimants of benefits and tax credits; assesses whether such costs can be measured and, if so, to what extent; and discusses whether impact assessments of policy changes could include such measurements. We also hope that this report will act as a catalyst for the further development of these techniques to improve policy assessment in the benefits and tax credits systems.

We study students' motives to obtain sixth form and university education in a sample of 885 secondary school students in the UK. At each educational stage, perceptions about the consumption value of education explain a substantial share of the variation in students' intentions to obtain further education, while beliefs about the monetary benefits and costs are not found to play an important role. Beliefs about the consumption value of university predict not only students' intentions to go to university but also their intentions to go to sixth form, highlighting the importance of dynamic considerations in the choice. We further document that students' beliefs about the consumption value of further schooling strongly predict students' perceptions about how likely it is that they will obtain the necessary grades to proceed to the next educational stage. Differences in the perceived consumption value across gender and socioeconomic groups can account for a sizeable proportion of the gender and socioeconomic gaps in students' intentions to pursue further education as well as in their perceptions about their own performance.

This paper presents a life-cycle model of woman's labour supply, human capital formation and savings for the evaluation of welfare-to-work and tax policies. Women's decisions are formalised in a dynamic and uncertain environment. The model includes a detailed characterisation of the tax system and of the dynamics of family formation while explicitly considering the determinants of employment and education decisions: (i ) contemporaneous incentives to work, (ii ) future consequences for employment through human capital accumulation and (iii) anticipatory effects on the value of employment and education. The choice of parameters follows a careful calibration procedure, based of a large sample of data moments from the British population during the nineties using BHPS data. Many important features established in the empirical literature are reproduced in the simulation exercises, including the employment effects of the WFTC reform in the UK. The model is used to gain further insight into the responses to two recent policy changes, the October 1999 WFTC and the April 2003 WTC/CTC reforms. We find small but non-negligible anticipation effects on employment and education.

With increasing integration of women into combat roles in the US military, it is critical to determine whether deployment, which entails unique stressors and exposures, is associated with adverse reproductive outcomes. Few studies have examined whether deployment increases the risk of preterm birth; no studies (to our knowledge) have examined a recent cohort of servicewomen. We therefore used linked medical and administrative data from the Stanford Military Data Repository for all US Army soldiers with deliveries between 2011 and 2014 to estimate the associations of prior deployment, recency of deployment, and posttraumatic stress disorder with spontaneous preterm birth (SPB), adjusting for sociodemographic, military-service, and health-related factors. Of 12,877 deliveries, 6.1% were SPBs. The prevalence was doubled (11.7%) among soldiers who delivered within 6 months of their return from deployment. Multivariable discrete-time logistic regression models indicated that delivering within 6 months of return from deployment was strongly associated with SPB (adjusted odds ratio = 2.1, 95% confidence interval: 1.5, 2.9). Neither multiple past deployments nor posttraumatic stress disorder was significantly associated with SPB. Within this cohort, timing of pregnancy in relation to deployment was identified as a novel risk factor for SPB. Increased focus on servicewomen's pregnancy timing and predeployment access to reproductive counseling and effective contraception is warranted.

Literature on transformations to sustainability increasingly recognizes transformation as inherently political, but the field still struggles to study these politics. Our research project 'Securing Tenure, Sustainable Peace?' on efforts to localize land registration in conflict-affected settings, both illustrates and contributes to understanding the politics of transformation. Building on insights from political ecology/economy, legal and political anthropology, and the anthropology of conflict, we analyse the politics involved in (1) the overarching policy discourses that legitimize these interventions; (2) the competition around these programmes; and (3) the outcomes, or the risks and contradictory effects of these programmes. We present insights that we consider relevant to develop better conceptualizations of the politics of transformations in sustainability studies more broadly. In particular, we draw attention to the tendency of de-politicization, which involves the hiding in technical formats of what are in essence political choices; as well as the need to give attention to institutional competition and to risks involved and unexpected outcomes of transformation.

Literature on transformations to sustainability increasingly recognizes transformation as inherently political, but the field still struggles to study these politics. Our research project 'Securing Tenure, Sustainable Peace?' on efforts to localize land registration in conflict-affected settings, both illustrates and contributes to understanding the politics of transformation. Building on insights from political ecology/economy, legal and political anthropology, and the anthropology of conflict, we analyse the politics involved in (1) the overarching policy discourses that legitimize these interventions; (2) the competition around these programmes; and (3) the outcomes, or the risks and contradictory effects of these programmes. We present insights that we consider relevant to develop better conceptualizations of the politics of transformations in sustainability studies more broadly. In particular, we draw attention to the tendency of de-politicization, which involves the hiding in technical formats of what are in essence political choices; as well as the need to give attention to institutional competition and to risks involved and unexpected outcomes of transformation.