An increasing proportion of people towards the bottom of the UK's income distribution are in a household where someone is in paid work. Working households comprised 37% of those below the official poverty line in 1994-95 and 58% in 2017-18. Much of that increase is due to trends that seem...

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. We find that solo self-employment is used to self-insure against employment shocks: employment rates fall and poverty...

In 2019, the employment rate among 25- to 64-year-olds in the UK reached 80% - the highest on record, and considerably higher than the 76% rate recorded shortly before the Great Recession. In this paper, we investigate this growth across several dimensions. We analyse which sectors, demographic...

Proponents of work search requirements for out-of-work welfare claimants argue they are effective in inducing individuals to work and delivering fiscal savings. In this paper, we provide a much more comprehensive assessment than has been available to date, exploiting a UK reform introducing...

Policy-makers have increasingly turned to 'in-work transfers' to boost incomes among poorer workers and strengthen work incentives. One attraction of these is that labour supply elasticities are typically greatest at the extensive margin. Because in-work transfers are normally subject to...

We build a model of job design under monopsony that yields predictions over the relationship between: (i) the amenity value of non-wage job features; (ii) whether they are costly or profitable to firms; (iii) monopsony power. We analyse the amenity value of schedule flexibility offered in the...

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. Hence inequalities in mental health have been increased by the...

In 1995, the UK government legislated to increase the earliest age at which women could claim a state pension from 60 to 65 between April 2010 and March 2020. This paper uses data from the first two years of this change coming into effect to estimate the impact of increasing the state pension...

This paper estimates the effects of entering the labour market when the economy is weak on subsequent living standards using consistent long-running household survey data from the UK. In line with previous research, we find persistent scarring effects on employment and earnings. However, we also...

Existing evidence on the effectiveness of automatic enrolment is focused on large employers. We compare pension savings of employees working for small employers who were pseudo-randomly affected by automatic enrolment with those working for small employers who, at the same moment in time, were...