The recent surge in inflation, driven by spectacular increases in energy prices, has driven sharp falls in household living standards, huge government intervention to try to mitigate it, and serious policy headaches. As such it continues to be the backdrop behind many of the most pressing issues...

Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is a disability benefit that aims to support individuals facing higher living costs due to difficulties in mobility or carrying out everyday tasks. In summer 2021, each month 15,000 or so working-age people started a PIP claim. That monthly figure had remained...

Policy-makers have increasingly turned to 'in-work transfers' to boost incomes among poorer workers and strengthen work incentives. One attraction of these is that labour supply elasticities are typically greatest at the extensive margin. Because in-work transfers are normally subject to...

We estimate the effect of the introduction of the UK's National Living Wage in 2016, and increases in it up to 2019, using a new empirical method. We apply a bunching approach to a setting with no geographical variation in minimum wage rates. We effectively compare employment changes in each...

We review the effects on the Covid-19 pandemic on inequalities in education, the labour market, household living standards, mental health, and wealth in the UK. The pandemic has pushed up inequalities on several dimensions. School closures particular disrupted the learning of poorer children,...

As a result of the Child Poverty Act (2010), current and future governments are committed to reducing the rate of relative income child poverty in the UK to 10% by 2020-21. This paper looks in detail at the progress made towards this goal under the previous Labour administrations. Direct tax and...

A growing literature on inference in difference-in-differences (DiD) designs with grouped errors has been pessimistic about obtaining hypothesis tests of the correct size, particularly with few groups. We provide Monte Carlo evidence for three points: (i) it is possible to obtain tests of the...

This report examines how household incomes were changing in the UK up to the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how other measures of household living standards have changed over the course of the pandemic. In particular, we use the latest official data covering years up to 2019-20 to provide a...

This report examines how material living standards - most commonly measured by households' incomes - have changed for different groups in the UK, and the consequences that these changes have for income inequality and for measures of deprivation and poverty. This is the 22nd annual report...

We examine the living standards and health of working-age disabled people and disability benefits recipients over time in the UK. The UK's disability benefits system (which is non-means-tested and in which receipt is unrelated to work status) has gone through a significant transformation since...