Jonathan is an Associate Director at IFS and Head of the Retirement, Savings, and Ageing sector. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and a Director of the Pensions Review, a review of the UK pension system and of the future of financial security in retirement. Most of his research focuses on understanding economic activity in later life, pensions, saving for retirement, and their interactions with public policies. He also leads the Deaton Review Country Studies project, which examines labour market and income inequalities in 17 European and North American countries. He is a former editor of the flagship IFS reports on Living Standards, Inequality, and Poverty.
Education
PhD Economics, University College London, 2020
MRes (Distinction) Economics, University College London, 2014
MPhil (Distinction) Economics, University of Cambridge, 2011
BA (1st Class) Economics, University of Cambridge, 2010
Using a large-scale panel data set, we trace the evolution of incomes and well-being around the entry into ‘solo self-employment’ – that is, running a business without employees.
Employing public sector workers to help deliver public services is a major part of what government does. The number of workers employed by the government and how much they are paid matters not just for those individuals and their families, but also for the public finances and for the public services those employees help provide.
Minimum wages can play an important role in raising living standards, and have become an important part of a government’s toolkit in addressing low pay.
Whether the UK leaves the European Union, and if so on what terms, is a crucial issue andtherefore rightly should be the subject of much debate in the run-up to the generalelection on 12 December.
In this short briefing note, we look at how earnings have changed over the last 11 years, how that differs when looking at hourly and weekly pay, and how different groups have seen different trends.
Interest in how the economic circumstances of younger generations compare to those who are older shows no signs of slowing. Politicians on all sides of the debate express interest, or concern, in how trends in UK economy and society are affecting those who are currently in their 20s and 30s in particular. But what does the latest data – which for the first time now allows analysis of those born in the late 1980s – say?
We examine the effect of obliging employers to enrol employees automatically into a workplace pension scheme. We exploit the phased roll-out of automatic enrolment, by employer size, in the first country to do so nationwide (the UK), to estimate its effect on pension saving among private sector employees.
IFS researcher Jonathan Cribb worked alongside historian Claire Langhamer, personal finance expert Sharon Collard and the BBC to analyse the shift in wages, house prices and property ownership over time.
Business owners have been the fastest-growing part of the UK labour force since at least 2000. Between 2000–01 and 2015–16, the number of employees grew by 15%, while self-employment (including those operating as a sole trader or as a partner in a partnership) grew by 25% and the number of directors of companies with at most two directors more than doubled. The number of new businesses created in the UK between 2007–08 and 2015–16 was higher than in any other OECD country.
This weekend, on Saturday 6th July, the state pension age rises again, to 65 and 5 months. Naturally, this means that some will have to wait longer to receive their state pension. But it also means that some with low incomes must wait longer to receive ‘Pension Credit’ – a means-tested benefit that aims to provide pensioners with a ‘minimum income’.
IFS researchers presented the key findings from the latest in the series of flagship IFS annual reports on living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the report analysed the latest data on living standards, while setting this in the context of developments in pay, employment and inflation.
This report examines how 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. In this latest report, we focus in particular on those people who are poorest in society.
