Documents Blundell, Jack 5 results

"Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For many countries, Britain included, a paucity of data has made this a question with very little reliable evidence to answer. To redress this evidence lacuna, we present a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata. As well as testing the robustness of existing survey evidence on mobility trends over time, this large dataset permits analysis to be undertaken at a more geographically disaggregated level than was previously feasible. Evidence is presented on occupational wages, home ownership and education. Our new analysis shows a slight decline in occupation-wage mobility and a substantial decline in home ownership mobility over the late 20th century in England and Wales, while the picture for educational mobility is less clear. Focusing on the most recent cohort, we find marked geographic differences in mobility. We find that occupation-wage mobility is exceptionally high in London, while ex-industrial and mining areas experience the lowest rates of mobility. Areas with low occupation-wage mobility were more likely to vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. Home ownership mobility is negatively correlated with house prices and not correlated with occupation-wage mobility, suggesting that geographical comparisons based on one dimension of mobility need not always align with those based on alternative measures. "

"The COVID-19 crisis is one of the largest economic shocks that has taken place in living memory. While current official statistics only pick up the very start of the crisis, the Bank of England has warned that unemployment is likely to exceed the heights of the global financial crisis and that GDP could plunge by 14% in 2020, marking the deepest recession for centuries. While the picture looks bleak on aggregate, Jack Blundell and Stephen Machin (LSE) seek to understand the impact on the self-employed, of whom there are now 5 million in the UK, making up 15.3% of the workforce."

"Six months after Covid-19 first hit, it is clear that it is the greatest economic crisis of the modern age. The economy has contracted far more rapidly than in previous crises, with GDP dropping by a record 19.5 per cent in April, and despite four subsequent consecutive monthly increases since then, remaining 9.2 per cent below the February 2020 level in August. Early indicators suggest at best a slow recovery that is stalling as the country faces a new wave of cases and harsher and localised restrictions on economic activity.

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"Almost a year into the Covid-19 crisis, it has become widely acknowledged that UK self-employment has been particularly hard hit. Here we continue our series investigating the experience of self-employed workers throughout the crisis. Surveying workers in early February 2021, we find that incomes among the self-employed in the third lockdown are still significantly below pre-crisis levels, and are broadly similar to those of the first lockdown. While government support has been a lifeline for some, we illustrate that important gaps in support remain."

"We use a UK employer-employee administrative earnings dataset to investigate the response of earnings and hours to business cycles. Exploiting our long panel of data from 1975 to 2020 we find wide heterogeneity in the exposure of different types of workers to aggregate shocks. Employees who are younger, male, lower-skilled, non-union, and working in smaller private sector firms show the largest earnings response to recessions. The qualitative patterns of earnings changes across workers observed in the COVID-19 recession are broadly as predicted using the previously estimated exposures and size of the GDP shock. This suggests the COVID-19 recession in terms of its impact responses was relatively similar to those that have gone before, but the GDP shock was far larger in absolute size. Compared to aggregate shocks, we find a relatively small role of firm-specific shocks, suggesting macro shocks play an outsized role in individual earnings dynamics."