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 and 2023/24 (WT & ST). Stephen enjoys teaching on courses at undergraduate and masters levels and PhD supervision. He convenes a full-year masters-level course on Welfare Analysis and Measurement, 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 杏吧论坛’s International Inequalities Institute.
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. He has substantive research interests in the analysis of the distribution of income – trends over time, differences across countries, and redistribution through taxation, social security and the labour market. Recent research includes work on inequality and poverty, income mobility and poverty dynamics, income volatility, and measurement errors in survey and administrative data. Stephen also has interests in quantitative methods for analysis of income distribution in particular and applied microeconometrics in general, especially survival analysis and statistical graphics.
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 Human Resources, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Journal of Social Policy, Labour Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 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, and he is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the , , and . Stephen has been Editor-in-Chief of the (2014–17) and is currently Editor of . His REF2021 Impact Case Study on Better measurement of income inequality levels and trends was top-rated.
Stephen is the only person to date to have been President of both of the leading scientific associations in the income distribution field: the (2006-8) and Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (, 2021-23). He has also been President of the (1998). Stephen was named as a Distinguished Fellow of the in July 2019. He has been a Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Labour (), Bonn, since 2000.
From 2022-24, Stephen was a member 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 the Panel’s Report .
Further resources
Stephen supervises doctoral studies in areas including:
Inequality, poverty, social mobility, benefit receipt; quantitative research methods and data, and their applications.