Tony Shorrocks completed his PhD at LSE and then joined the LSE teaching staff as Lecturer and Reader (1972-1983). In 1983 he was appointed Professor of Economics at Essex University, where he was instrumental in establishing the British Household Panel Study and acted as its Director of Economic Research from 1990-93. He has also held visiting positions at Queen's University Ontario, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, the Australian National University, Southern Methodist University, the European University Institute in Florence, and the New Economic School in Moscow. From 2001-09 he served as Director of the United Nations World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki, after which he became consultant to the Credit Suisse Research Institute from 2010-23.

Shorrocks early research focussed on the measurement of inequality, poverty and mobility. The first paper on mobility measurement in economics evolved from a chapter in his PhD chapter. Another paper written shortly afterwards, developed the mobility measure nowadays referred to as the “Shorrocks index”. In the context of inequality and poverty indices, Shorrocks pioneered the “axiomatic approach” which posits desirable properties for social indices and then derives the class(es) of indices which satisfy these requirements. Particular attention is given to decomposition issues, which seek to quantify the importance of factors that contribute to inequaility, for example subgroups distinguished by geographical regions, age, gender or race, or income components such as earnings, investment income, or public transfers. In recognition of these research contributions, he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1996.

The second major strand in Shorrocks’ research is empirical work with James Davies on personal wealth holdings. This led in 2008 to the first estimates of global wealth inequality, which claimed inter alia that the top 1 percent of wealth holders worldwide held about 40% of total household wealth, very similar to estimates in recent years. Credit Suisse Research Institute sponsored this research from 2010 onwards and the wealth estimates developed into a comprehensive and widely used household wealth database documented in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook and summarised in the annual Crtedit Suisse Global Wealth Report. Shorrocks led the research team behind this renowned database until the demise of Credit Suisse in 2023.