Inequality and the insurance value of transfers across the life cycle

背景和动机提供“社会保险”（政府支付给那些生病、失业、残疾、贫穷或年老的人的福利）占政府支出的比重超过任何其他类别的公共支出。这种社会保险对所有家庭都有潜在的价值，而不仅仅是那些在特定时间点接受这些福利的家庭。它确保，如果家庭陷入困境，他们将免受极低生活水平的影响。然而，提供社会保险也带来了成本。这些成本是直接的（例如，转移的财务成本）和间接的（例如，提供福利减少了工作和储蓄的动机）。平衡这些成本和收益对决策者来说是一项挑战。在不平等加剧的背景下，各国政府正试图管理不断上升的社会保险成本，并实现其再分配目标，因此需要强有力的证据来证明税收和转移支付对家庭行为和福祉的影响。你提议的研究将开发和测试家庭储蓄和劳动力供应的模型，以评估社会保险计划改革将如何影响家庭行为、家庭福祉、不平等和公共财政。一项核心挑战是开发和应用一种方法，能够可靠地估计政策变化时家庭行为的变化程度——包括过去和未来可能发生的改革。为此，我们将开发“生命周期”模型，将每个时期的家庭决策（如储蓄、劳动力供应、参与社会保险计划和代际转移）与他们在该时期的福祉以及他们在未来时期的机会（和福祉）联系起来。我们的模型将在现有工作中发现的模型的基础上进行创新，无论是在规模上还是在政策的范围上，这些政策的影响将被用来量化。重要的是，这将使我们能够在一个连贯的框架内，而不是孤立地研究互补政策。例如，我们将研究公共养老金和私人养老金补贴如何相互作用，在考虑退休规定改革时，我们将共同考虑公共和私人养老金制度（而不是像以前的工作那样分别考虑）。这种最先进的方法带来了大量的数据需求和大量的计算负担，我们将通过建立ESRC之前在财政研究所的投资来克服这些问题。我们将使用新的和很少开发的关联调查和管理数据，以及前沿的计算方法和计算机投资来估计这些模型。应用、效益和影响我们的最终目标是让决策者和更广泛的用户群体更好地了解家庭行为如何对政府的社会保险政策作出反应。我们将回答的问题包括：-国家养老金制度的慷慨程度和结构应如何应对人口压力？-提供残疾津贴对劳动力供应和领取者的健康结果有什么影响？——为什么退休家庭会把财富保存到最老的时候，而不是花掉？遗产税的变化将如何改变这一点？-遗产（以及未来获得遗产的前景）在多大程度上影响家庭储蓄行为和不平等？我们将通过制作一系列将结果传达给不同受众的产出来最大限度地发挥我们的影响。除了将提交给顶级经济期刊的一系列学术文章外，我们还将编写一些非技术报告，并附有新闻稿，总结针对非学术受众（记者、政策制定者和其他非学术用户）的关键发现。

Context and motivationThe provision of 'social insurance' (the benefits governments pay to those who are ill, unemployed, disabled, poor or old), accounts for more government expenditure than any other category of public spending. This social insurance is potentially valuable to all households, not just those receiving those benefits at a given point in time. It ensures that, should households find themselves in difficult circumstances, they will be shielded from extremely low living standards. However, the provision of social insurance also brings costs. These costs are both direct (e.g. the financial cost of the transfers) and indirect (e.g. the provision of benefits reduces the incentives to work and save). Balancing these costs and benefits is a challenge for policy-makers.As governments seek to manage the rising costs of providing social insurance and achieve their redistributive objectives in the context of rising inequality, robust evidence is needed on the effects of taxes and transfers on the behaviour and well-being of households.Aims and methodologyOur proposed research will develop and test models of household savings and labour supply to evaluate how reforms to social insurance schemes would impact household behaviour, household well-being, inequality and the public finances.A central challenge is to develop and apply a methodology that can robustly estimate the extent that household behaviour changes when policies change - including both past and potential future reforms. To do this we will develop 'lifecycle' models which link household decisions (such as saving, labour supply, participation in social insurance programs, and intergenerational transfers) in each period with their well-being in that period and their consequent opportunities (and well-being) in future periods. Our models will innovate substantially over those found in existing work, both in terms of their scale and the range of policies whose impact they will be used to quantify. Importantly, this will allow us to study complementary policies in a coherent framework, rather than in isolation. For example, we will examine how public pensions and private pension subsidies interact, and in considering reforms to retirement provision, we will jointly consider the public and private pension systems (rather than separately, as has been the case in previous work). This state-of-the-art methodology brings with it substantial data requirements and large computational burdens, which we will overcome by building on previous ESRC investments at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. We will use new and little-exploited linked survey and administrative data as well as frontier computational methods and computer investments to estimate these models.Applications, benefits and impactOur ultimate aim is to allow policy-makers and the broader user community to better understand how household behaviour responds to government policy on social insurance. The questions that we will answer include:- How should the generosity and the structure of the state pension system respond to demographic pressures? - What are the effects of provision of disability benefits on labour supply and on the health outcomes of those who receive them? - Why do retired households maintain their wealth into their oldest years rather than spend it? How would changes to inheritance taxation change this?- To what extent are inheritances (and the prospect of future receipt of inheritances) affecting household saving behaviour and inequality? We will maximise our impact by producing a range of outputs that will communicate the results to diverse audiences. In addition to a series of academic articles that will be submitted to top economic journals, we will produce a number of non-technical reports, accompanied by press releases, that summarise the key findings directed at non-academic audiences (journalists, policy-makers and other non-academic users).