British tax credit simplification, the intra-household distribution of income and family consumption

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

April 15, 2016

Summary:

This paper asks whether targeting welfare benefits to women can be effective at changing household spending. We provide empirical evidence on this question by using a reform to the UK tax-credit system in 2003 as a quasi-experiment. We find that the reform caused low-income households to reallocate spending towards children’s goods. The results further demonstrate that the effects of directing welfare benefits to women can extend beyond child expenditures to goods that are collectively consumed by all household members. Our findings are in contrast to those from earlier studies that took place in the economic setting of 1970s UK.

Published in

Oxford Economic Papers

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 68 , p.444 -464

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oep/gpv068

ISSN

307653

Subjects

Notes

© Oxford University Press 2015.

Open Access article

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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