Do the UK Government’s welfare reforms make work pay

Fiscal policies and the prices of labor: a comparison of the U.K. and U.S.

“…The second difference from Adam and Browne (2013) is that my sample excludes persons not working at all during the year, whereas Adam and Browne's include them. The difference is important because "The majority of the welfare reforms involve changing the maximum amount of means-tested support that can be received by those with no other income" (Adam and Browne (2013), p. 10).…”

“…The changes over time would be the same if housing allowances had been included and stayed in a fixed proportion with the weekly employer cost of the median worker. See Adam and Browne (2013) for discussion of housing allowance policy changes and Appendix II for list of tax and benefit programs that are included in this paper's calculations. Table 2's first column lists all of the tax and benefit programs that contribute to my calculation of the U.K. employment tax wedge according to equation (4).…”

“…Our studies have two major differences -the baseline against which policies are compared and the types of individuals considered -as well as a more subtle difference in the type of incentive(s) that we measure. On the first point, both their paper and mine note that "earnings have increased less quickly than benefit rates, which tends to make working less attractive" (Adam and Browne (2013), p. 1). Equivalently, benefit rates have increased more than wage rates: is that a policy change or not?…”

Social rents policy: choices and tradeoffs

“…39 We restrict our analysis to direct personal taxes (including employer National Insurance contributions), cash benefits and social rent levels. Other work by IFS researchers (for example, Adam and Browne (2013)) has also included the effect of indirect taxes on work incentives. However, since the FRS does not have data on household expenditure and we are not looking at reforms to indirect taxes, we exclude indirect taxes.…”

Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2014

“…Median income for non-working households was 60% of that of working households in 2007-08, but 67% by 2012-13 (with the ratio rising from 68% to 77% for pensioner households and from 50% to 56% for out-of-work working-age households). In the context of these changes, it is not surprising that Adam and Browne (2013) find that changes in the macroeconomy (as opposed to tax and benefit reforms) have served to weaken work incentives in recent years.…”