Pay

The unwinding of the furlough scheme represents a step towards ‘normality’ in the labour market, but it also will mean big income losses for many of those who end up unemployed unless they are swiftly able to find alternative employment. In this observation we discuss the kind of support available for such workers via other programmes, and what sort of hit to their income they might see if they do lose their jobs.

At this event, IFS researchers presented their findings from a new report that seeks to shed new light on the working lives of people in their 50s and 60s, and discussed the key implications for the future.

In this report, we provide fresh evidence on the nature of paid work at older ages, how employment patterns differ for people in different circumstances and how the situation is changing over time.

We investigate differences in the returns to undergraduate degrees by socio-economic background and ethnicity using the Department for Education’s Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data set.

This report seeks to set out the potential effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on inequalities in the UK. The pandemic has affected inequalities in education, training, wages, employment and health, including how these vary by gender, ethnicity, and across generations.

The politics may make sense. The economics less so. Earnings in general have had a terrible decade. People in the public sector have fared worse. The average teacher earns 9 per cent less, after accounting for inflation, than in 2010.

Self-employment in the UK has risen dramatically. At this event, we discussed findings from a new report that explores the nature of the rise of self-employment, what it tells us about the state of our labour market, and how the Covid-19 crisis has affected the self-employed.

In this report, we use a novel source of real-time data on households’ finances from Money Dashboard, a budgeting app, to explore the impacts of the crisis so far on earnings, incomes and financial distress, and how they are evolving. We complement this with household survey data to explain and verify the key trends.

This report examines how living standards – most commonly measured by households’ incomes – were changing in the UK up to approximately the eve of the current COVID-19 crisis, using the latest official household income data covering years up to 2018–19.