Professor Sir Richard Blundell

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation—including education, and savings for women in the United Kingdom, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy.

In this paper we document significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures in the UK compared to the US, in spite of income paths being similar. We explore several possible causes, including different employment paths, housing ownership and expenses, levels and paths of health status, number of household members, and out-of -pocket medical expenditures. Among all the potential explanations considered, we find that those to do with healthcare—differences in levels and age paths in medical expenses—can fully account for the steeper declines in nondurable consumption in the UK compared to the US.

The UK higher education sector has expanded remarkably over the past three decades. In 1993, 13% of 25- to 29-year-olds had first degrees or higher degrees. By 2015, this had roughly tripled to 41%. Naturally, one may wonder whether the big expansion has reduced the economic returns to having a first degree. We have all heard stories about graduate unemployment and graduates employed in low-wage jobs. But what do the data show and what can we learn from history?

Since the early-1990s the UK experienced an unprecedented increase in university graduates, but at the same time the age profile of the graduate premi

We use comparable data from the US and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of assets among households aged 70 and over.

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.

This paper examine the link between wage and consumption inequality using a life-cycle model incorporating consumption and family labor supply decisions.

This paper uses comparable data from the U.S. and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of assets among households age 70 and older.

The authors develop a new quantile-based panel data framework to study the nature of income persistence and the transmission of income shocks to consumption.

The authors develop a new quantile-based panel data framework to study the nature of income persistence and the transmission of income shocks to consumption.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation - including education, and savings for women in the UK, exploiting policy changes. This was first published as an NBER working paper in March 2015.

The UK has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits, including the introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995 and the replacement of Incapacity Benefit with Employment and Support Allowance from 2008. The authors bring together administrative and survey data over the period and highlight key differences in receipt of disability benefits by age, sex and health.

In this paper, the authors use rich Norwegian population panel data to answer important questions about labour income dynamics over the life-cycle, including the relative importance of persistent shocks, transitory shocks and heterogeneous profiles.