Poverty, inequality and social mobility

This report analyses the changing economic positions of tenants in subsidised public housing. It shows how low their incomes are today, how these low incomes interact with higher rents and the housing benefit system to reduce their returns to work and looks at a number of reforms to the benefit system.

This paper presents a revealed preference method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual price of new goods and suggests a way to improve these bounds by using non-parametric expansion paths. This allows the calculation of cost-of-living and price indices when the number of goods changes between periods.

We analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare.

Is Britain a highly mobile society, or are affluence and poverty largely transmitted from one generation to the next? This report suggests that the economic standing of parents is an extremely important determinant of where their children end up in the income distribution.

In this paper the authors show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in U.S. household-level data.

Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption.

The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern.

Taxes on alcohol are among the oldest in the UK and are still an important source of tax revenue.

This study is based on a new data source, the BHPS, which allows researchers to follow the fortunes of the same households from one year to the next. It finds that the poorest tenth of households in 1992 were on average around 3% worse off in real terms than the poorest tenth in 1991, but that this result was mainly attributable to previously non-poor households becoming worse off.

Much of the debate over inequality in the UK has focused on household incomes. This study provides details of trends in household spending levels. It finds that the inequality of household expenditures has risen much more slowly over the 1980s than the inequality of household incomes.

This report looks at some of the economic issues surrounding the current system of alcohol taxes in the UK and considers how far current taxes on alcohol are sustainable as European integration proceeds.

We argue that once one departs from simple classroom example, or 'stripped down life-cycle model', the empirical model for consumption growth can be made flexible enough to fit the main features of the data.

In this paper we use household level data on income and expenditure to analyse the importance of precautionary saving in the UK.

In this paper we examine the concept of intergenerational mobility in earnings and in lifetime or 'permanent' status, and discuss its measurement using regression and quantile transition matrix approaches.