Documents Brewer, Mike 8 results

"We analyse income inequality in Great Britain over the period 1968-2009 in order to understand why income inequality rose very rapidly over the period 1978-91 and then stopped rising. We find that earnings inequality has risen fairly steadily since 1978, but other factors that caused inequality to rise in 1978-91 have since reversed. Inequality in investment and pension income has fallen since 1991, as has inequality between those with and without employment. Furthermore, certain household types – notably the elderly and those with young children – which had relatively low incomes in 1978-91 have seen their incomes converge with others."

"This paper reviews how income-support systems affect labour force participation in the UK. The UK's approach to social insurance is “basic security”, with modest, typically flat-rate, benefits; insurance-based benefits are relatively unimportant. Compared with the EU, the UK has high employment rates, but a high proportion of non-workers say that they are not working through disability. In general, the low generosity of out-of-work benefits means that positive incentives to work exist for almost all benefit recipients, but weak work incentives exist for those receive Housing Benefit, and for primary earners in couples who have low earnings. Recent reforms to strengthen work incentives have altered the in-work tax credits, rather than the benefit system, and recent reforms to the out-of-work benefits have involved toughening and extending job-search requirements. The two main political parties seem to agree that future reforms will involve more conditionality, a greater use of the private sector, and a unification of the different labour market programmes."

"A substantial body of research on the UK's National Minimum Wage (NMW) has concluded that the the NMW has not had a detrimental effect on employment. This research has directly influenced, through the Low Pay Commission, the conduct of policy, including the subsequent introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW). We revisit this literature and offer a reassessment, motivated by two concerns. First, much of this literature employs difference-in-difference designs, even though there are significant challenges in conducting appropriate inference in such designs, and they can have very low power when inference is conducted appropriately. Second, the literature has focused on the binary outcome of statistical rejection of the null hypothesis, without attention to the range of (positive or negative) impacts on employment that are consistent with the data. In our re-analysis of the data, we conduct inference using recent suggestions for best practice and consider what magnitude of employment effects the data can and cannot rule out. We find that the data are consistent with both large negative and small positive impacts of the UK National Minimum Wage on employment. We conclude that the existing data, combined with difference-in-difference designs, in fact offered very little guidance to policy makers."

"As soon as the scale of the coronavirus shock to the economy became clear, the UK government introduced three policies to protect directly household incomes: a Job Retention Scheme, to pay the wages of employees who were temporarily furloughed; a Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, to give grants to established self-employed people whose businesses had been affected; and a package of increases to entitlements to social security benefits, with Universal Credit at the core, that bolstered the UK's means-tested ‘safety net'. This paper analyses the design and beneficiaries of these policies and, given the distributional pattern of the labour market shock, considers the emerging overall impact on living standards, particularly of low-income households."

"The scale of the Covid-19 crisis, its cause, and the speed at which it hit, have all been different from previous crises. The highly unequal impact on different sectors, the scale of behavioural change – with reduced travel and the shift of spending online – and the very unusual policy response – including the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (JRS) – also mark this out as not just any old recession. From remote working to changes in the size of different sectors, Covid-19 has also changed the way that we work. This report, part of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, considers the nature of these labour market developments with an eye on the longer-term changes, and the resulting challenges for policy makers over the rest of this decade.

First, it is now clear that fears of rising unemployment have been largely unfounded. Instead, participation has taken a hit – particularly through younger and older workers leaving the labour force, something which could leave a permanent hit to GDP. Second, the labour market is still in flux, and the frictions and mismatch that have already emerged means that the Covid-19 crisis will hit productivity in the short run. Finally, although full-time homeworking looks set to end, hybrid working models are expected to stay, particularly for highly-paid workers. Too many people are focused on the lifestyle changes for professionals; the longer-lasting impact of homeworking will be disruption for lower earners, who need to find new jobs in new places as demand shifts."

"We study the volatility of sources of individual and household level income in the UK in the years 2009-2017, following the Great Recession and government austerity. We find that the volatility of (pre-tax) earnings and disposable income has fallen for the working-age in this period, largely due to fewer negative and large earnings shocks. For older individuals, we also find a fall in the volatility of private income, mainly due to fewer positive and large income shocks. Taxes and transfers help stabilise incomes, with social security cash benefits and income-dependent refundable tax credits reducing household private income volatility by around a quarter for the working age, and 40 percent for those aged 60 or over. However, over the sample period, taxes and benefits became less well correlated with earnings, reducing their ability to counteract swings in labour income. The findings illustrate the consequences of fiscal retrenchment and the cut-backs to welfare benefits on the stability of incomes."