Work in Progress
The Changing Nature of Work: What can we learn from Time Use Diaries? (with Lynsey Brown, Rebecca Riley and Mechelle Viernes)
We use new time diary data from the UK Office for National Statistics (April 2020–March 2025) to examine the persistence of remote work and its relationship to time use, well-being, and self-perceived productivity. Remote workers spend less time in paid work and over an hour less commuting per day than on-site workers. They reallocate this time toward sleep, unpaid caregiving, and health-related leisure, and exhibit greater temporal flexibility by shifting work away from early mornings and mid-day hours toward the late afternoon. Despite these adjustments, remote workers report lower instantaneous enjoyment and self-assessed productivity whilst working. Our findings suggest that the sustained preference for remote work is driven less by perceived gains in productivity or well-being in work and more by the avoidance of commuting and increased flexibility in non-work activities. These results have implications for the design of hybrid work arrangements and contribute to broader discussions on time allocation, labour supply, and commuting behaviour.
Not Just a North-South Divide: The Geography of Opportunity in England (with Pedro Carneiro, Sonya Krutikova, Julia Loh, Lindsey Macmillan)
The United Kingdom is one of the most spatially unequal countries in the OECD, yet most evidence on intergenerational inequality focuses on national patterns. This paper investigates how growing up in poorer versus richer neighbourhoods is associated with adult earnings across England. We use newly linked administrative data from the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) dataset, combined with Census and labour market records, to follow three birth cohorts (1985–1988) through to age 30. We find that the strength of the relationship between childhood neighbourhood SES and adult earnings varies sharply across England. We also document striking geographic variations in earnings of those who grew up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, showing that those who grew up in large cities outside London fare particularly poorly. While the North–South divide is evident in the main patterns that we document, we find that most variation actually occurs within rather than between regions. Two themes run through our analysis: substantial gender differences in key trends, and the fact that greater equality within a place does not always translate into better outcomes for the disadvantaged. Key policy implications of our analysis include the need to consider highly localised inequalities, gender differences and whether greater equality is achieved through improvements for the disadvantaged.
Perseverance in the classroom: results from a randomised educational intervention in primary schools in England (with Sherria Hoskins and Heather Rolfe), submitted
This paper studies the effect of a randomised educational intervention aimed at increasing perseverance in the classroom on cognitive outcomes, beliefs and attitudes towards learning. The trial is carried out in 100 primary schools in England. The subjects are Year 6 pupils who are introduced to the idea of resilience, perseverance and incremental intelligence by their teachers over several sessions. Pupils in the intervention group perceive significantly less that their intelligence is a fixed trait. The intervention also has a positive but not statistically significant effect on the positive attitude towards learning of treated pupils. However, unlike other related trials in psychology, education and economics, our analysis finds that the intervention has no impact on literacy nor numeracy overall, and that this applies across all pupils includ- ing those eligible for Free School Meals.
Global Competition, UK Labour Market Adjustment and the Brexit Vote (with Rebecca Riley)
Media: The Times
We explore the adjustment of local labour markets in the UK to the sharp rise in import competition from low-wage countries since the early 2000s. We find that the increase in UK imports from China and Eastern Europe accelerated the long-term trend decline in UK manufacturing jobs and led to a short-term increase in the unemployment rate in exposed areas. But, many workers in these areas found lower paid low-skilled jobs outside manufacturing, mitigating the effects of import competition on joblessness. Local labour markets that were most exposed to import competition shrank in size relative to other areas as highly educated workers left behind these parts of the UK. We also find that the electorate in exposed areas was more likely to vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. Rather than the uneven gains from globalisation, it is the reallocation of highly educated workers across different areas of the UK that accounts for much of this link. When we also consider the rise in exports to low-wage countries, the measured effects of globalisation on local labour markets and the referendum result are less pronounced.
The effect of Austerity on educational attainment (with Gustave Kenedi, Sandra McNally and Olmo Silva, in progress)
Academies and the competition in local education markets (with Olmo Silva, in progress)
Internal migration of young people in England and social mobility (in progress)
Board composition and gender wage gap in the UK (with Marcello Sartarelli, in progress)