Pay

The distributional impact of proposed reforms plays a central role in public debates around tax and transfer policy. We show that accounting for realistic patterns of mobility in employment, earnings and household circumstances over the life-cycle greatly affects our assessment of the distributional effects of tax and transfer reforms.

This briefing note is the first output in a programme of work seeking to understand the gender wage gap and its relationship to poverty. Section 1 sets out what we mean by the gender wage gap, how it differs according to education level and how it has evolved over time and across generations. Section 2 provides some descriptive evidence on how the gender wage gap relates to the presence of dependent children and the employment outcomes associated with that.

The UK higher education sector has expanded remarkably over the past three decades. In 1993, 13% of 25- to 29-year-olds had first degrees or higher degrees. By 2015, this had roughly tripled to 41%. Naturally, one may wonder whether the big expansion has reduced the economic returns to having a first degree. We have all heard stories about graduate unemployment and graduates employed in low-wage jobs. But what do the data show and what can we learn from history?

We study students’ motives for educational attainment in a unique survey of 885 secondary school students in the UK. As expected, students who perceive the monetary returns to education to be higher are more likely to intend to continue in full-time education. However, the main driver is the perceived consumption value, which alone explains around half of the variation of the intention to pursue higher education. Moreover, the perceived consumption value can account for a substantial part of both the socio-economic gap and the gender gap in intentions to continue in full-time education.

The focus of this report is the distribution of household income in the UK. We assess the changes to average incomes, income inequality and poverty that occurred in the latest year of data (2014–15), and put these in historical context using comparable data spanning the last 50 years.

This report, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is the fifteenth in an annual series published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). It analyses the HBAI statistics and digs deeper to explore the driving forces behind key trends in living standards, inequality and poverty.

Since the early-1990s the UK experienced an unprecedented increase in university graduates, but at the same time the age profile of the graduate premi

Official data on the distribution of household incomes in the UK are available only with a significant lag: the latest statistics are for 2013–14. In this report, we use modelling techniques to provide a more up-to-date picture and to assess how things are likely to evolve in the coming years.

This paper examine the link between wage and consumption inequality using a life-cycle model incorporating consumption and family labor supply decisions.

We exploit wage regulation to examine the impact of pay on school performance and analyse data from over 3000 schools containing around 200,000 teachers who educate around half a million children per year.