Work Count the pennies: Explaining a decade of lost pay growth 9 October 2018 by Stephen Clarke and Paul Gregg This paper gets to the bottom of why real wages are still 3 per cent below their level before the crisis. It both explains why the wage squeeze was so much worse in the UK compared to other advanced economies and why the recovery since 2014 has been so sluggish. READ MORE
Work· Generations Study, Work, Progress, Repeat? How and why pay and progression outcomes have differed across cohorts 23 February 2017 by Laura Gardiner and Paul Gregg This paper is the fifth report for the Intergenerational Commission, which was launched in the summer of 2016 to explore questions of intergenerational fairness that are currently rising up the agenda and make recommendations for repairing the intergenerational social contract. It attempts to understand the concerning finding that millennials who have entered work so far … Continued READ MORE
Work The road to full employment: what the journey looks like and how to make progress 3 March 2016 by Paul Gregg and Laura Gardiner ‘Full employment’, for so long considered an unreachable relic of a bygone age, is back on the agenda. That it is once again part of economic and political debates is testament to the UK’s remarkably strong employment performance in recent years. A record-high employment rate is something few people would have thought possible this soon … Continued READ MORE
Work Employing new tactics: the changing distribution of work across British households 31 January 2016 by Paul Gregg and David Finch Inevitably, discussion of employment tends to focus on individuals. But this means that an understanding of how work – and the income that it brings – is shared across different types of households can be lost. During the 1980s and early-1990s employment became increasingly polarised in society, with increasing concentrations of workless single or couple … Continued READ MORE
Work A steady job? The UK’s record on labour market security and stability since the millennium 28 July 2015 by Paul Gregg and Laura Gardiner The story on pay is well-established but other aspects of job quality are less routinely measured. Therefore, in this note we return to some commonly-used broad measures of job security and stability, in particular to understand developments over the past two decades and how experiences have differed across genders and the generations. READ MORE
Work Completing the job: the pursuit of full employment 20 July 2015 by Matthew Whittaker and Paul Gregg While there is some consensus around the merits of pursuing full employment, there is no widely agreed definition of what constitutes ‘full’. Nor have we heard much on quite how any given target might be achieved. In this briefing– which marks the launch of a major piece of research on the topic which will conclude before … Continued READ MORE
Work An Ocean Apart: the US-UK switch in employment and benefit receipt 4 June 2015 by Adam Corlett and Paul Gregg There was a time when some looked to the US model – in which out-of-work benefits are less readily available, time-limited and significantly less generous – for answers to the problem of extensive European levels of worklessness. This was particularly the case during the so-called ‘tough love’ era of the 1990s. The reforms of this … Continued READ MORE
Work What a drag: The chilling impact of unemployment on real wages 19 September 2012 by Paul Gregg and Steve Machin Real wage growth in the UK labour market, since around 2003, has slowed down and stagnated. This report documents the nature of real wage changes across the wage distribution over the last three decades, showing that the recent period of stagnant real wage growth represents a distinct break of trend that pre-dates the onset of … Continued READ MORE
Social security Creditworthy: Assessing the impact of tax credits in the last decade and considering what this means for Universal Credit 27 June 2012 by Paul Gregg and Alex Hurrell and Matthew Whittaker Creditworthy assesses the direct and indirect impacts of tax credits, finding that there is no evidence that tax credits hold down low wages. The analysis discredits the assumption that tax credits, available to low and middle income families, enable employers to pay lower wages. Tax credits reach around six million families, providing substantial support for … Continued READ MORE
