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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Richard Blundell; Monica Costa-Dias; Graham Mazeine; Costas Meghir; Tom Waters |
| Abstract: | Work experience has been found to be a key determinant of work and wages for educated women, but it seems to play a smaller role for the less educated. For them, welfare, tax credits and family composition matter more, and increasingly so does participation in disability programmes. Here we document how labor supply, wages, health, and disability claims have evolved in the UK over the last three decades, and examine how reforms to tax credits, disability benefits and other welfare programs have changed work incentives over this period. We then introduce these features into an empirical dynamic structural model of life-cycle labor supply, human capital and disability benefit application, in which human capital combines health capital, experience accumulated in work, and education. Estimating the model on a panel of working-age women in the UK, we examine the interactions between experience capital and health capital in driving life-cycle earnings across different education groups. Our results highlight the importance of interactions in the disability benefit, welfare and tax-credit systems for understanding the life cycle pattern of hours, employment, earnings, and disability claims, and for evaluating policy counterfactuals. |
| JEL: | D15 D31 H24 H31 I14 I3 J14 J22 J31 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35861 |
| By: | Pedro Carneiro (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Kjell G. Salvanes (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Barton Willage (University of Delaware); Alexander Willén (Norwegian School of Economics) |
| Date: | 2026–10–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:26/61 |
| By: | Stephen Jenkins |
| Abstract: | This paper fits four-parameter GB2 distributions to UK unit record household survey data for 42 years from 1977 to 2018. Parameter estimates are used to describe key features of the household income distribution and its evolution over time, including inequality. The paper also discusses and illustrates issues of statistical inference and data quality, and the relative goodness of fit of distributions that are special cases of the GB2. Singh-Maddala distributions typically fit better than Dagum distributions, and the two-parameter Fisk distribution fits the UK income distribution well for almost every year in the 2003-2018 period. |
| Keywords: | Income inequality, Generalized Beta distribution of the Second Kind, Singh-Maddala distribution, Dagum distribution |
| JEL: | C16 C46 D31 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26241 |
| By: | Sardo, Alessio; Arlia, Daniela; Cerruti, Gianluca |
| Abstract: | Purpose This paper aims to explore the interaction between labor market reforms and housing policies in Italy, Spain and the UK. Design/methodology/approach By providing a comparative legal analysis of significant policy changes at the macro level and a descriptive overview of the evolution of their main economic determinants – wages and housing prices – at the micro level, the study highlights the socioeconomic impact of these reforms and their contribution to urban disparities. Findings The analysis suggests that the implementation of labor market reforms aimed at increasing flexibility and competitiveness coincided with heightened precarity, particularly for low-wage and nonstandard workers across all countries. Research limitations/implications The analysis does not address causality. Practical implications The paper suggests that stratified labor policy and work deregulation have an impact on urban inequality and wage distribution at sub-city level. Social implications The study argues that these reforms, coupled with macro-events such as the increase in global trades and the advent of ICT, might have exacerbated the socioeconomic inequalities at both national and local levels over the last decades by disfavoring less skilled workers, particularly in large cities. Originality/value The originality of the paper lies in its integrated analysis of labor-market reforms and housing policies as jointly producing urban disparities. Rather than treating wage stagnation, employment precarity and housing unaffordability as separate phenomena, the paper connects them through a comparative framework covering Italy, Spain and the UK. Its contribution is also empirical and spatial: it combines national regulatory trajectories with city-level evidence from Milan, London and Madrid, showing how macro-level reforms translate into uneven urban outcomes. This multi-scalar approach offers a distinctive perspective on the legal, economic and territorial roots of contemporary inequality. |
| Keywords: | European Cities;housing affordability;housing market analysis;housing prices;reforms;wage disparities |
| JEL: | R14 J01 N0 |
| Date: | 2026–12–14 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:141253 |
| By: | Andrea Boitani (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore; Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore); Maurizio Franzini |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the relationship between economic inequality, growth and social welfare, challenging the conventional identification of welfare with GDP and the widespread assumption that greater equality necessarily entails lower growth. An Atkinson-type social welfare function is first adopted in which welfare increases with average income and decreases with inequality. Using stylised income distributions broadly reflecting the contemporary United States and the more egalitarian Scandinavian economies of the 1980s and 1990s, it is shown that faster growth in a highly unequal economy may generate less welfare than slower growth in a more equal one. Progressive taxation combined with uniform transfers increases welfare, even when redistribution involves substantial efficiency losses of the kind represented by Okun’s “leaky bucket”. Dynamic simulations further indicate that a more unequal but faster-growing economy may require several decades to reach the welfare level of a more egalitarian, slower-growing economy; progressive taxation significantly shortens this convergence period. Finally, an alternative welfare measure is introduced, which is based on individual aversion to disadvantageous inequality, whereby welfare depends partly on the income gap relative to the richest group. Under this approach, aggregate welfare may rise while the welfare of the bottom 90 % declines, thereby undermining conventional applications of both the Kaldor–Hicks compensation principle and the Pareto criterion. |
| Keywords: | Economic inequality; Social welfare; Economic growth; Progressive taxation; Inequality aversion. |
| JEL: | D63 I31 O40 H24 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctc:serie1:def156 |
| By: | Shruti Jha; John A. List; Rebecca C. Royer; Anya Samek |
| Abstract: | Do early investments in parents pay off even when treatment effects for children appear to fade out quickly? We answer this question by leveraging a field experiment in which households with 3-5 year-old children were randomized into a parenting program, a preschool, or a control group, combined with a natural experiment (Covid-19 school closures) that occurred ten years later. Prior to the closures, treatment effects on academic achievement had faded to zero across all groups. Yet, with Covid-19 school closures, effects of the parenting program re-emerge: test scores in control and preschool groups drop by roughly 0.25-0.30 SD, whereas scores in the parenting group drop by only 0.11 SD (difference: p = 0.01). Our findings suggest that parenting programs can generate latent human capital that only becomes visible when complementary school inputs are removed. This result is consonant with parental and school investments acting as substitutes in skill production. Because this latent parental capacity pays off precisely when school inputs fail, standard measurement tools for early childhood programs can miss crucial state-contingent value. |
| JEL: | C93 I26 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35851 |
| By: | Richard B. Freeman; Danxia Xie; Hanzhe Zhang; Hanzhang Zhou |
| Abstract: | We analyze the academic affiliations of nearly 6, 000 award-winning researchers in 18 major fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences from the 1820s to the 2020s, focusing on the 1960s onward. The analysis reveals a trend of declining concentration in the institutional affiliations of award-winning researchers, shifting from a few science-strong universities in high-income countries to a more diverse set of institutions across the world. The decline in concentration is observed in all fields except one: economics. The institutional affiliations of prizewinning economists have become more concentrated over time, making economics the most concentrated field. We associate the higher concentration of prizewinning work in economics with the field’s stronger sorting by institutional prestige, its lower reliance on specialized equipment and instruments, and its assessment of findings based on a synthesis of evidence rather than on decisive experiments or proofs. We discuss the benefits and costs of this high and rising institutional concentration of prizewinning economists. |
| JEL: | A11 A12 A14 I23 J44 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35875 |