Professor Frank Cowell

Director PEP and CASE Associate; Professor, Department of Economics

Telephone:

+44 (0)20 7955 7277

Email:

f.cowell@lse.ac.uk

Connect:

Website

Biography

Professor Frank Cowell's current research interests are:

Inequality and Poverty
Income and Wealth Distribution
Taxation

Frank's latest projects include:

Luxembourg Income Study, Phase 3
Living Standards, Inequality and Taxation
Parents and Children: Intergenerational Income Mobility in the UK and USA
Attitudes to Social Equity: an Internet Approach

Latest

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Inequality Measurement and the Rich: Why inequality increased more than we thought

27 June 2018

Frank A Cowell and Emmanuel Flachaire

Many standard inequality measures can be written as ratios with the mean in the denominator. When one income moves away from equality, both the numerator and the denominator may vary in the same direction and such indic... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Inheritance Taxation: Redistribution and Predistribution

08 December 2017

Frank A Cowell, Chang He and Dirk Van de gaer

It is well known that taxes on the transfer of wealth typically raise very little revenue. However, this does not mean that they are ineffective as tools for redistribution. In this paper we show how important such tax... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Condorcet was Wrong, Pareto was Right: Families, Inheritance and Inequality

08 December 2017

Frank A Cowell and Dirk Van de gaer

Using a simple model of family decision making we examine the processes by which the wealth distribution changes over the generations, focusing in particular on the division of fortunes through inheritance and the unio... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Welfare and Inequality Comparisons for Uni- and Multi-dimensional Distributions of Ordinal Data

22 March 2017

Frank A Cowell, Martyna Kobus and Radoslaw Kurek

Decision makers and social planners are often faced with a problem of evaluating distributions of ordinal variables i.e. variables for which there are no numbers but only the ordering, such as, for example, self-reported... Read more...

CEP discussion papers

European identity and redistributive preferences

14 July 2015

Joan Costa-Font and Frank A Cowell

How important is spatial identity in shifting preferences for redistribution? This paper takes advantage of within-country variability in the adoption of a single currency as an instrument to examine the impact of the re... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

European Identity and Redistributive Preferences

01 July 2015

Joan Costa-Font and Frank A Cowell

CASEpapers

Piketty in the long run

17 February 2015

Frank A Cowell

I examine the idea of 'the long run' in Piketty (2014) and related works. In contrast to simplistic interpretations of long-run models of income- and wealth-distribution Piketty (2014) draws on a rich economic analysis t... Read more...

CASEbriefs

Wealth distribution, accumulation and policy

03 June 2013

Francesca Bastagli, Frank A Cowell, Howard Glennerster, John Hills, Eleni Karagiannaki and Abigail McKnight

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Mobility in China

13 May 2013

Yi Chen and Frank A Cowell

We examine the evidence on rank and income mobility in China during the decades immediately preceding and immediately following the millennium using panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. We show that ran... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Do We Value Mobility?

10 May 2013

Yoram Amiel, Michele Bernasconi, Michele Bernasconi, Frank A Cowell, Valentino Dardanoni and Valentino Dardanoni

Is there a trade-off between people's preference for income equality and income mobility? Testing for the existence of such a trade-off is difficult because mobility is a multifaceted concept. We analyse results from a q... Read more...

STICERD Work in Progress Seminars

Measuring mobility: A new approach

26 January 2011

Frank Cowell (PEP, STICERD, London School of Economics)

STICERD Work in Progress Seminars

Mobility Measurement

10 November 2010

Frank Cowell (PEP, STICERD, London School of Economics)

STICERD Work in Progress Seminars

Preference Reversals

06 February 2002

Frank Cowell (PEP, STICERD, London School of Economics)