Stephen Jenkins

CASE Associate and Professor of Economic and Social Policy

Expertise: quantitative analysis of survey and administrative record data, applications to inequality, poverty, volatility, mobility, labour market

Telephone:

+44 (0)20 7955 6527

Email:

s.jenkins@lse.ac.uk

Room:

OLD 2.44

Connect:

Twitter
CV

Links:

CASE
Department of Social Policy

Biography

Stephen is a quantitative generalist mostly using unit record (survey and administrative) data, with interests spanning labour and public economics, inequality and poverty, and applied econometrics. His substantive research interests include analysis of the distribution of income. Recent research includes work on inequality and poverty, income mobility and poverty dynamics, income volatility, and measurement errors in survey and administrative data. Former President of International Association for Research on Income and Wealth (IARIW), Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ), and European Society for Population Economics (ESPE). Distinguished Fellow of the New Zealand Association of Economists and Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA), Bonn.

Stephen Jenkins's current research interests are:

Inequality
Poverty
Income mobility and poverty dynamics
Income volatility
Measurement errors in survey and administrative data

Stephen's latest projects include:

Earnings volatility in the UK using HMRC PAYE data
Assessing the statistical significance of UK income inequality trends
Measurement error in data on employment earnings
Measurement error and estimation of poverty transition rates

Latest

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Tony Atkinson and his Legacy

27 June 2017

A Brandolini, Stephen P Jenkins and John Micklewright

Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Pareto models, top incomes, and recent trends in UK income inequality

18 August 2016

Stephen P Jenkins

I determine UK income inequality levels and trends by combining inequality estimates from tax return data (for the ‘rich’) and household survey data (for the ‘non-rich’), taking advantage of the better coverage of top i... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Trends in Individual Income Growth: Measurement Methods and British Evidence

01 August 2015

Stephen P Jenkins and Philippe Van Kerm

Assessments of whose income growth is the greatest and whose is the smallest are typically based on comparisons of income changes for income groups (e.g. rich versus poor) or income values (e.g. quantiles). However, inco... Read more...

CASEpapers

The income distribution in the UK: A picture of advantage and disadvantage

18 February 2015

Stephen P Jenkins

This paper describes the UK income distribution and how it has evolved over the last 50 years. It also includes some comparisons with the income distributions of other rich countries. Multiple perspectives on the distrib... Read more...

Labour Markets Workshops

Earnings and labour market volatility in Britain

05 March 2013

Stephen Jenkins (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

CASEpapers

The relationship between EU indicators of persistent and current poverty

01 March 2013

Stephen P Jenkins and Philippe Van Kerm

The current poverty rate and the persistent poverty rate are both included in the EU’s portfolio of primary indicators of social inclusion. We show that there is a near-linear relationship between these two indicators ac... Read more...

CASE Social Exclusion Seminars

The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income

07 December 2011

Stephen Jenkins (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

STICERD Work in Progress Seminars

Trends in individual income growth: measurement methods and British evidence

02 February 2011

Stephen Jenkins (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Labour Markets Workshops

Has Income Mobility in Britain Changed Over the Last two Decades?

25 January 2011

Stephen Jenkins (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

CASEpapers

Disability and Disadvantage: Selection, onset and duration effects

01 November 2003

Stephen P Jenkins and John A. Rigg

This paper analyses the economic disadvantage experienced by disabled persons of working-age using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We argue that there are three sources of disadvantage among disabled person... Read more...

Distributional Analysis Research Programme Papers

Estimating Welfare Indices: Household Weights and Sample Design, (published in Research on Economic Inequality, vol. 9 (2002), pp. 147-172).

01 June 2000

Frank A Cowell and Stephen P Jenkins

The techniques of simple random sampling are seldom appropriate in the empirical analysis of income distributions. Various types of weighting schemes are usually required either from the point of view of welfare-economic... Read more...

CASEpapers

Measuring Income Risk

01 June 2000

Simon Burgess, Karen Gardiner, Stephen P Jenkins and Carol Propper

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contr... Read more...

Distributional Analysis Research Programme Papers

How much inequality can we explain? A methodology and an application to the USA (Now published in The Economic Journal, vol.105, no.429 (March 1995), pp. 421-430)

01 May 1994

Frank A Cowell and Stephen P Jenkins

We develop two simple measures of how much inequality is explained by individual population characteristics or groups of characteristics, analogous to R2 in regression analysis. We investigate the measures' empirical imp... Read more...

Selected Work:

Stephen P. Jenkins. ‘Top-income Adjustments and Official Statistics on Income Distribution: The Case of the UK’. Journal of Economic Inequality, 20 (1), 151–168, (2022)
Richard V. Burkhauser, Nicolas Hérault, Stephen P. Jenkins, and Roger Wilkins. ‘What Accounts for the Rising Share of Women in the Top 1%?’. Review of Income and Wealth, 69 (1), 1–33, (2023)
Arthur Grimes, Stephen P. Jenkins, and Florencia Tranquilli. ‘The Relationship Between Subjective Wellbeing and Subjective Wellbeing Inequality: Taking Ordinality and Skewness Seriously’. Journal of Happiness Studies, 24 (1), 309–330, (2023)
Stephen P. Jenkins and Fernando Rios-Avila. ‘Reconciling Reports: Modelling Employment Earnings and Measurement Error Using Survey and Administrative Data’. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A: Statistics in Society), 186 (1), 110-136, (2023)
Nicolas Hérault and Stephen P. Jenkins. ‘Redistribution, Horizontal Inequity, and Reranking: Direct Taxation in the United Kingdom, 1977–2020’. Journal of Income Distribution, 32 (3-4), 238-262, (2023)
Nicolas Hérault, Dean Hyslop, Stephen P. Jenkins, and Roger Wilkins. ‘Rising-top Income Persistence in Australia: Evidence from Income Tax Data’, Review of Income and Wealth, 70 (1), 154–186, (2024)