Paul has been director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies since 2011. He is a columnist for The Times, and is a regular contributor to other broadcast and print media. He is a visiting professor in the UCL Policy Lab and at the UCL department of economics.
He was for 10 years a member of the UK Climate Change Committee, and has served on the council of the ESRC and of the Royal Economic Society. Paul led reviews of pension auto-enrolment and of inflation measurement for the UK government, and of fiscal devolution for the Northern Ireland executive.
Previous roles have included time as chief economist at the Department for Education and as director of public spending at HM Treasury, where he also served as deputy head of the government economic service.
Paul published the Sunday Times bestseller “Follow the Money” in 2023.
He was appointed CBE in the 2018 birthday honours.
Education
MSc Economics, Birkbeck, University of London, 1992
BA (1st Class) Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Oxford, 1988
Official statistics give rise to the perception that UK income inequality increased substantially during the 1980s, but are not of themselves adequate to provide
unambiguous conclusions about inequality changes.
A survey of the main issues involved in using equivalence scales to estimate the costs of children for policy purposes: the authors estimate a range of scales for the UK and examine the impact of varying scales on official statistics.
