Average real UK household income has almost doubled over the past forty years. With four decades of micro-data on household incomes, and relatively simple decomposition methods, we document the contribution to this growth in the mean net household income of working-age households from different...

We analyse income inequality in Great Britain over the period 1968-2009 in order to understand why income inequality rose very rapidly over the period 1978-91 and then stopped rising. We find that earnings inequality has risen fairly steadily since 1978, but other factors that caused inequality...

This paper compares consumption and income as measures of households' living standards using UK data. It presents evidence that income is likely to be under-recorded for households with low resources. It describes the different impressions one gets about trends in the level and inequality of...

Conventional in-work benefits (IWB) are means-tested, open to all workers with sufficiently low income, and usually paid without a time-limit. This paper evaluates an IWB with an alternative design that was aimed at lone parents in the UK and piloted in one third of the country, and that...

We assess comprehensively how incomes, employment, housing, mental health and life satisfaction change following a partnership dissolution, using data from 18 waves of BHPS. We confirm that women and children see living standards decline by more than men, on average, upon separation, but find...

Time-limited in-work credits are cheaper, and more targeted, than conventional in-work credits, but are thought to have small to zero long-term impacts. We study two time-limited in-work credits in- troduced in the mid-2000s in the UK and find they reduced welfare participation and increased...

Using administrative tax data, we estimate top income shares for the UK through to 2015-16 (at the time of writing, the UK data held by the World Income Database stopped in 2014-15). Top income shares fell back considerably in 2009, but there is now a clear upward trend: by 2015/16, the share of...