[…] the bottom of the distribution, and their effect on poverty and inequality largely depends on the generosity of the benefits implemented. By contrast, automatic stabilisers mitigate the impact of the income shock at the top of the distribution due to the effect of social insurance contributions and personal income tax, whereas social assistance programmes […]

Using UKMOD, the UK tax-benefit microsimulation model, we analyse the impact on Londoners of the Covid-19 crisis, of the emergency policies put in place since March 2020 and of some counterfactual policy options, including the continuation of the £20 weekly uplift in Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit. Our main results can be summarised […]

[…] at least in part driven by people seeking informal debt advice, for example from family and friends. Our paper does not allow to make conclusions about the impact of seeking formal debt advice. This is because the encouragement did not increase the probability of seeking formal debt advice. New evidence is needed to gather […]

We quantify the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on psychological well-being using information from a large-scale panel survey representative of the UK population. Exploiting exogenous variation in the timing of vaccinations, we find that vaccination increases psychological well-being by 0.12 standard deviation, compensating for around one half of the overall decrease caused by the pandemic. […]

We study the impact of broadband penetration on social capital in the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits a technological feature of the telecommunication infrastructure that generated substantial variation in the quality of Internet access across households. The speed of a domestic connection rapidly decays with the distance of a user’s line from the network’s […]

[…]   IP13 employed a web-first and telephone follow-up mixed-mode design, which differed from past waves but was necessitated due Covid-19. It also continued ongoing experiments on the impact of incentives, and as with prior waves, several other methodological experiments were included in the survey. Experiments were conducted on how to best collect contact information […]

We study the impact of broadband penetration on social capital in the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits a technological feature of the telecommunication infrastructure that generated substantial variation in the quality of Internet access across households. The speed of a domestic connection rapidly decays with the distance of a user’s line from the network’s […]

[…] and transfers at the regional level in Czechia, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Poland and the UK. Using microsimulation techniques, we provide descriptive statistics and estimates of the impact of 2019 tax-benefit policies on poverty and within and between-region inequality. Within-region inequality is found to be the primary explanatory factor of total inequality in all […]