Research and analysis

A socially mobile country provides equal opportunities for everyone, across big cities and small towns, and regardless of whether your parents are rich or poor. This report makes use of newly linked administrative data on all state-educated pupils born between 1986 and 1988 to follow a group of sons from where they grew up, looking at their family circumstances and their educational achievement, through to the labour market.

Journal article published in the Journal of Health Economics in September 2020. Full (open-access) article available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762962030014X?via%3Dihub

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and associated containment measures are expected to cause far-reaching damage to economies around the world. Firms are suffering from reduced demand due to movement restrictions, from reduced labor supply and from constraints to sourcing material inputs. The breakup of otherwise healthy businesses in response to a temporary shock implies large social costs. Governments are therefore intent on designing emergency policies to keep businesses afloat. In this brief, the authors present simulations using firm-level tax records from Uganda, which vary the duration of the lockdown and the relative impact across sectors.

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and associated containment measures are expected to cause far-reaching damage to economies around the world. Firms are suffering from reduced demand due to movement restrictions, from reduced labour supply and from constraints to sourcing material inputs. The breakup of otherwise healthy businesses in response to a temporary shock implies large social costs. Governments are therefore intent on designing emergency policies to keep businesses afloat. In this brief, the authors present simulations using firm-level tax records from Ethiopia, which vary the duration of the lockdown and the relative impact across sectors.

The IFS Deaton Review was launched to understand the causes of economic and social inequalities, and their effects on societies and on our political discourse. Such an analysis is particularly important for the economics and politics of trade policy: trade and globalisation can have important economic benefits, but these benefits are often widely, and thinly, spread across many consumers, while the costs of factory closures and changing employment structures can fall disproportionately on specific population groups.

Many empirical questions concern target parameters selected through optimization. For example, researchers may be interested in the effectiveness of the best policy found in a randomized trial, or the best-performing investment strategy based on historical data.

This paper contributes to a small but growing body of work addressing this issue by exploring the potential for community detection algorithms to delineate labour submarkets using observed patterns of labour market mobility.

Recent contributions using police recorded calls-for-service and/or crime data to estimate impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns on the incidence of domestic violence (DV) have reported relatively modest effects.

We analyze how shutdown policies affected unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use proxy data from Google Trends to disentangle the effects of six policies. State-level policies caused 12.4% of unemployment insurance claims early on. Restaurant limits and non-essential business closures had modest effects. Other policies (e.g. stay-at-home orders, school closures) had no additional effect.

Roughly one third of a cohort drop out of high school across OECD countries, and developing effective tools to address prime-aged high school dropouts is a key policy question.