Stephen P. Jenkins is Professor of Economic and Social Policy, having joined the Department of Social Policy in January 2011. He was head of department for academic years 2016/17 to 2018/19. Stephen enjoys teaching on courses at both undergraduate and masters levels and also PhD supervision. He convenes a full-year masters-level course on ‘Welfare Analysis and Measurement’ and a full-year first-year undergraduate course on ‘Social Economics and Policy’, and contributes to several other courses. Stephen is also part of the teaching faculty in the School of Public Policy, and coordinates the Global Inequalities Observatory in LSE’s International Inequalities Institute.
Stephen is a quantitative generalist with most of his research about income inequality and poverty, and also mobility. His work addresses topics such as the rise in top incomes and their contribution to recent increases in inequality, how to measure poverty persistence and assess which factors trigger exits from a poverty spell. He also researches related topics such as labour market participation and the tax and benefit system. He has interests in quantitative research methods including statistical graphics, and the use of survey and administrative record data. He welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students to work on topics in his areas of interest.
Stephen’s research has been published in a wide range of journals including: Economic Journal, Economica, European Sociological Review, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Economic Inequality, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Journal of Social Policy, Labour Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Review of Income and Wealth. He has also published several books including Changing Fortunes: Income Mobility and Poverty Dynamics in Britain (OUP, 2011) and The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income (co-edited with Brandolini, Micklewright and Nolan, OUP 2013). He has written reports for organisations such as the UK Department for Work and Pensions, the OECD, and New Zealand Treasury. Stephen was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Economic Inequality (2014–17). He was President of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth (2006–8) and of the European Society for Population Economics (1998). Stephen was named as a Distinguished Fellow of the New Zealand Association of Economists in July 2019. He is the elected President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) for 2021-23. He is a Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA), Bonn, and Editor of The Stata Journal.
During 2022 and 2023, Stephen is part of the Panel on an "Integrated System of U.S. Household Income, Wealth, and Consumption Data and Statistics to Inform Policy and Research" established by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Committee on National Statistics. Read more here.
Further resources
CV
Downloadable papers and software
Google Scholar
Survival Analysis Using Stata
Stephen supervises doctoral studies in areas including:
Inequality, poverty, social mobility, benefit receipt; quantitative research methods and data, and their applications.