This paper uses individual data on employment and wages to shed light on the UK's productivity puzzle. It finds that workforce composition cannot explain the reduction in wages and hence productivity that we observe; instead, real wages have fallen significantly within jobs. Why? One possibility...

Conventional in-work benefits or tax credits are now well established as a policy instrument for increasing labour supply and tackling poverty. A different sort of in-work credit is one where the payments are time-limited, conditional on previous receipt of welfare, and, perhaps, not...

The UK government is in the process of introducing a radical package of welfare reforms that it hopes will encourage more people to work as well as reducing government expenditure. The largest structural change planned is the introduction of universal credit to combine six existing means-tested...

The pensioner population a decade from now is likely to look different to today's population. There will not only be more pensioners but those retiring over the next few years will have experienced different economic conditions in their working lives, been subject to a different policy...

Income inequality has increased in most OECD countries over the past two decades. This is both because market incomes (wages, dividends, interest income) have become more unequally distributed, and also because redistribution through taxes and transfers has fallen. New OECD work explores...

Recent debates of basic income (BI) proposals shine a useful spotlight on the challenges that traditional forms of income support are increasingly facing, and highlight gaps in social provisions that largely depend on income or employment status. A universal “no questions asked” public...

In the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis, large shares of working-age individuals in Lithuania either do not work or only to a limited extent. By 2013, several years after the start of the labour-market recovery, 21% were still without employment during the entire year, and a...

In the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis, large shares of working-age individuals in Estonia either did not work or only to a limited extent. By 2013, several years after the start of the labour-market recovery, 18% were still without employment during the entire year, and a further...