James is Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester, Senior Research Fellow at IFS where he is Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP), and a founding Co-Principal Investigator of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. His research focuses on empirical modelling of individual economic behaviour over the life-cycle. His early work focused on consumption and spending patterns, asset accumulation and pension choices. Subsequently he has worked on broader issues in the economics of ageing, such as health, physical and cognitive functioning and their association with labour market and broader socioeconomic status, and the dynamics of work disability.
Education
PhD Economics, University College London, 1998
MSc Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1990
BSc (First Class Honours) Economics, University of Bristol, 1988
We describe the association between recent changes in socioeconomic inequality and trends in mortality disparities for different age and sex groups at small-area level in England.
Using objective measures of lung function, we document strong positive associations in health within couples in all European countries but large and significant differences in this correlation within broad European regions, with Southern Europe having by far stronger correlations than elsewhere.
A special Issue of Fiscal Studies published today by Wiley on behalf of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) provides new analysis of the evolution of mortality levels and socio-economic inequalities in 11 OECD countries, including England, over the last 20-30 years.
In this paper, we study the evolution of age-group- and gender-specific mortality and mortality inequality in England between 2003 and 2016, by comparing small geographic areas ranked by deprivation and grouped into bins of similar population size.
In this paper, we estimate the effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic on mental health in the UK. We use longitudinal micro data for the UK over the period 2009–20 to control for pre‐existing trends in mental health and construct individual‐specific counterfactual predictions for April 2020, against which the COVID‐19 mental health outcomes can be assessed.
This paper investigates risk attitudes at older ages in 14 European countries. Older individuals report lower willingness to take risks in all countries.
The lockdown measures that were implemented in the spring of 2020 to stop the spread of COVID‐19 are having a huge impact on economies in the UK and around the world. In addition to the direct impact of COVID‐19 on health, the following recession will have an impact on people's health outcomes.
Mental health in the UK worsened substantially as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic – by 8.1% on average and by much more for young adults and for women which are groups that already had lower levels of mental health before Covid-19.
