ESRI Seminar: "Mobility and the Lifetime Distributional Impact of Tax and Transfer Reforms"
About the ESRI Seminar Series
The ESRI organises a public seminar series, inviting researchers from both the ESRI and other institutions to present new research on a variety of public policy issues. The seminar series provides access to specialised knowledge and new research methodologies, with the objective of promoting research excellence and facilitating productive dialogue across the policy and research fields.
Download Barra Roantree's presentation slides here.
Guest Speaker: Barra Roantree, Institute for Fiscal Studies Venue: ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2
Seminar Topic
Barra Roantree presents the paper "Mobility and the lifetime distributional impact of tax and transfer reforms" by Peter Levell, Barra Roantree and Jonathan Shaw. The distributional impact of actual and proposed reforms plays a central role in public debates around tax and transfer policy. These impacts are typically assessed by comparing the change in disposable income across different income groups. Such analyses however suffer from an important limitation. The incomes used to rank households are almost always assessed over a period of a year or less, and other household characteristics are only observed in cross-section. In this paper the authors build a statistical model of earnings and demographics across life using processes estimated from the 18-wave British Household Panel Survey. They use this to assess the lifetime impacts of various tax and transfer reforms, comparing reforms to in-work versus out-of-work benefits, and increases in the rates of income tax. In all cases, they find that the estimated lifetime distributional impacts differ in important ways to those implied by standard cross-sectional analyses.
Guest Speaker Bio
Barra Roantree joined the Institute for Fiscal Studies in 2012, where he works in the Direct Tax and Welfare sector. His current research projects include a cross-country collaborative analysis of the effects of social security contributions on earnings, an investigation into the redistribution achieved by the UK tax and benefit system across the life-cycle, and research into the labour supply responsiveness of women over time. He holds a BA (1st Class) in Economics from Trinity College Dublin and a MSc in Economics from Trinity College Dublin.