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...

In this report, we present the first evidence on how the cohorts of young people who entered the labour market during the pandemic have fared up to now. In Section 2, we discuss why we might expect the pandemic to lead to scarring effects, documenting how labour market outcomes evolved over the...

An increasing proportion of people towards the bottom of the UK's income distribution are in a household where someone is in paid work. Working households comprised 37% of those below the official poverty line in 1994-95 and 58% in 2017-18. Much of that increase is due to trends that seem...

In 2019, the employment rate among 25- to 64-year-olds in the UK reached 80% - the highest on record, and considerably higher than the 76% rate recorded shortly before the Great Recession. In this paper, we investigate this growth across several dimensions. We analyse which sectors, demographic...

We study household income inequality in both Great Britain and the United States and the interplay between labour market earnings and the tax system. While both Britain and the US have witnessed secular increases in 90/10 male earnings inequality over the last three decades, this measure of...

This paper estimates the effects of entering the labour market when the economy is weak on subsequent living standards using consistent long-running household survey data from the UK. In line with previous research, we find persistent scarring effects on employment and earnings. However, we also...

We develop a measure of labour market opportunities for heterogenous types of worker, exploiting information on their suitability different jobs encoded in historical patterns of worker mobility. We provide a theoretical foundation for our measure, which features naturally in a general random...