Inequality

This report shows the extent to which low pay and unemployment are related, the effects of periods out of work on future earnings and the degree to which low pay is a persistent phenomenon. Importantly it demonstrates the way in which a minimum wage might affect a much higher proportion of the population than is generally appreciated because of the way in which people move in and out of low paid work. A chapter of the report is also given over to the effects of work experience and job tenure on pay levels.

This paper illustrates recent trends in household consumption and personal savings in the UK and the US and discusses some theoretical models that can be used to interpret them.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.

One-and-a-half million pensioners are dependent on the minimum means-tested benefit, income support.

We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners.

The Hicks-Leontief composite commodity theorem permits aggregation of sets of goods that have identical price movements into composite groups of goods, each of which can be treated like a single good for demand analysis.

This report analyses the changing economic positions of tenants in subsidised public housing. It shows how low their incomes are today, how these low incomes interact with higher rents and the housing benefit system to reduce their returns to work and looks at a number of reforms to the benefit system.

We analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare.

This paper presents a revealed preference method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual price of new goods and suggests a way to improve these bounds by using non-parametric expansion paths. This allows the calculation of cost-of-living and price indices when the number of goods changes between periods.

Is Britain a highly mobile society, or are affluence and poverty largely transmitted from one generation to the next? This report suggests that the economic standing of parents is an extremely important determinant of where their children end up in the income distribution.

In this paper the authors show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in U.S. household-level data.

Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption.

The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern.

Taxes on alcohol are among the oldest in the UK and are still an important source of tax revenue.

This study is based on a new data source, the BHPS, which allows researchers to follow the fortunes of the same households from one year to the next. It finds that the poorest tenth of households in 1992 were on average around 3% worse off in real terms than the poorest tenth in 1991, but that this result was mainly attributable to previously non-poor households becoming worse off.

Much of the debate over inequality in the UK has focused on household incomes. This study provides details of trends in household spending levels. It finds that the inequality of household expenditures has risen much more slowly over the 1980s than the inequality of household incomes.