Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and...

In this paper, we assess the happiness cost of Brexit in the UK and the EU, using data from the Gallup World Poll. We implement a two-stage learning machine, using a naive Bayes classifier to extract happiness preferences of the population and then passing these onto an artificial neural network...

We examine the living standards and health of working-age disabled people and disability benefits recipients over time in the UK. The UK’s disability benefits system (which is non-means-tested and in which receipt is unrelated to work status) has gone through a significant transformation since...

During the last 10 years, many OECD countries introduced reforms which included automatic enrolment or mandatory participation in privately managed pension schemes. The current article aims to reveal the benefits and costs of privately managed pension schemes. The article uses a study of pension...

This rapid review summarises the economic impacts of the pandemic on ethnic minorities, focusing on the city of Manchester. It utilises multiple reporting sources to explore various dimensions of the economic shock in the UK, linking this to studies of pre-COVID-19 economic and ethnic...

In all continental European countries there exist non-market mechanisms that determine or "regulate" wage rates for the low-paid. We consider the experience of three countries that have national minimum wages - France, Belgium, and the Netherlands - and three where low wage rates are determined...

Wal-Mart matters to the form and substance of law and social reform in several distinct ways. This article describes Wal-Mart as serving three key purposes - as target, symbol, and model - in the contemporary social reform landscape. First, Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the United States is...

This paper assesses Italy’s 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD’s Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that...

We consider the impact of Tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We thus analyze both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion...

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation - including education, and savings for women in the UK, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy. We find substantial elasticities for labor supply and particularly for lone...