Those who are not married or cohabitating in the years before retirement are at greater risk of having inadequate income in retirement, according to a new study published today by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).

This report - funded by the Community Foundation for Ireland - explores the issue of energy poverty and deprivation in Ireland, once again to the forefront of the policy debate given recent increases in energy prices.

Most analysis of the effects of the tax and benefit system is based on snapshot information about a single cross-section of people. Such an approach gives only a partial picture because it cannot account for the fact that circumstances change over life. This paper investigates how our impression of redistribution undertaken by the tax and benefit system changes when viewed from a lifetime perspective. To do so, we simulate lifecycle data designed to be representative of the experiences of the baby-boom cohort, born 1945-54. We examine the properties of the current tax and benefit system as well as historical and hypothetical reforms from both a lifetime and a snapshot perspective. We find that much of what the tax and benefit system achieves is effectively to redistribute across periods of life and, as a result, it is much less effective at reducing lifetime inequality than inequality at a snapshot.

This paper simulates the impact that Covid-19 related job losses will have on family incomes and the public finances. It finds that in the central 'medium' unemployment scenario of 600,000 job losses, around 400,000 families will see their disposable income fall by more than 20 per cent in the absence of policy changes, with proportionately larger losses for those in higher income families. Measures announced by the Government - notably the flat-rate Pandemic Unemployment Payment of €350 per week - reduce the numbers exposed to such extreme losses by about a third, but at significant cost to the Exchequer. The paper also finds that the additional cost of the Government's Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme may be minimal, in part because its current design is less generous to lower earners than the Pandemic Unemployment Payment they would receive if laid off.

Even before the pandemic, an ageing population, a potential over-reliance on corporation tax receipts and an inevitable decline in motor tax revenues combined to make the need for future tax rises likely. This paper examines a range of options that a government seeking to raise or replace tax revenues might consider, assessing what is known about how much they would raise, who would bear the burden and what economic effects they might have.

Using micro data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) Household Budget Survey (HBS), we assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumption and its implications for indirect tax receipts in 2020. We show that over one-third of household expenditure is on items that are currently restricted due to public health measures such as transport, selected retail expenditure and entertainment items. We parameterise three scenarios which attempt to take into account: 1) a return to a 'new normal' with ongoing physical and social distancing; 2) a 'second wave' lockdown; and 3) rapid vaccine development that allows a return to normal economic and social life by the end of 2020. Under these scenarios, household consumption this year is estimated to be between 12 and 20 per cent lower than what it would have been in the absence of the pandemic. Indirect tax paid by households is estimated to be between 19 and 32 per cent lower than it otherwise would have been.

This thesis contains four papers on public economics, exploring how the tax and transfer system shapes the outcomes and behaviour of individuals. The first paper considers how a jointly assessed system of income tax for couples - which can impose high marginal rates on second earners - affects the careers of women. It develops a rich lifecycle model, and finds that by improving the incentive to accumulate human capital, the UK's abolition of joint income taxation resulted in higher employment and changes in the timing of fertility decisions. The second paper considers how our impression of inequality and the role of the tax and transfer system changes when individuals' circumstances are measured over a longer horizon than that captured by typical household surveys. Using 18-waves of panel data from the UK, it shows inequality is lower, redistribution less extensive, and benefit receipt more widespread than if measured at a point in time. The third paper extends this horizon further, using a dynamic microsimulation approach to examine the lifetime distributional impact of reforms to the tax and transfer system. It finds that - on average - work-contingent benefits are just as effective at redistributing resources to the lifetime poor as increases to out-of-work benefits, and that progressive taxes levied on annual income are effectively targeted at the lifetime rich. The final paper exploits "kinks" and "notches" in the UK personal tax schedule over a 40-year period to investigate how taxpayers respond to income tax and social security contributions. At kinks, where the marginal rate rises, it finds bunching in the distribution of income reported to tax authorities by company owner-managers and the self-employed, but not those with only employment income. Responses to notches, where the average rate rises, provide compelling evidence that this is because most employees face substantial frictions.