Foreign firms face enormous obstacles in attracting investors and analysts when issuing securities in the United States. We use US-listed Chinese firms as our research sample and find that firms that hire top executives (i.e., Chief Executive Officer [CEO] or Chief Financial Officer [CFO]) with...

This paper examines executive compensation in the subsidiaries of business groups in China. Analyzing a sample of China business groups (the so-called 'XiZu JiTuan' in Chinese) from 2003 to 2012, we find convincing evidence of the use of Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) in the executive...

This paper investigates whether religious traditions influence firm-specific crash risk in China. Using a sample of A-share listed firms from 2003 to 2013, we provide evidence that the more intense the religious environment, the lower the stock price crash risk, implying that religion plays an...

This report examines how living standards - most commonly measured by households' incomes - have changed for different groups in the UK, and the consequences that these changes have for income inequality and for measures of deprivation and poverty. In this latest report, we focus in particular...

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...

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...

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...

We estimate the effect of the introduction of the UK's National Living Wage in 2016, and increases in it up to 2019, using a new empirical method. We apply a bunching approach to a setting with no geographical variation in minimum wage rates. We effectively compare employment changes in each...

We review the effects on the Covid-19 pandemic on inequalities in education, the labour market, household living standards, mental health, and wealth in the UK. The pandemic has pushed up inequalities on several dimensions. School closures particular disrupted the learning of poorer children,...

We develop a measure of labour market opportunities for heterogenous types of worker, exploiting information on their suitability different jobs encoded in historical patterns of worker mobility. We provide a theoretical foundation for our measure, which features naturally in a general random...