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Has the Instability of Personal Incomes been Increasing?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Stephen P. Jenkins
Stephen P. Jenkins*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
*
e-mail:S.Jenkins@lse.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This paper examines trends in the instability of personal incomes in Britain in terms of changes in the transitory variance and in volatility, measures that have received much recent attention in research about the USA. It is shown that, although US measures have trended upwards over the past two decades, there is no such trend in Britain between the early-1990s and the mid-2000s. Explanations for these differences are discussed.

Keywords

Transitory varianceincome volatilityincome instabilityincome riskBritish Household Panel Surveylongitudinal dataI32J31D31
Type
Research Article
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 218 , October 2011 , pp. R33 - R43
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

This paper is a revised and shortened version of Chapter 6, ‘Transitory variation and volatility in income’ of Jenkins (2011) used by permission of Oxford University Press. The research was supported by core funding from the University of Essex and the UK Economic and Social Research Council for the Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (where I was employed until January 2011). Two anonymous referees made helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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