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Brian Bell.

Brian Bell

Associate

Expertise: labour economics, immigration, economics of crime

Telephone:
020 7836 4068
Email:
b.bell1@lse.ac.uk
brian.bell@kcl.ac.uk
Connect:
Website
Links:
CEP Crime
CEP Labour
King's College London

Biography

From March 2026, Professor Brian Bell is chief economic adviser to the Treasury and head of the Government Economic Service. He was Professor of Economics and Head of the Economics Department at King's Business School. Previously he was Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee (2020-2026) and a member of the Police Pay Review Body from 2014-17.

Current areas of research include:

  • Wages and inequality: CEO pay; the impact of immigration on wages and employment; intergenerational mobility.
  • Immigration: Impact of immigration on economic and social outcomes; impact of immigration policy changes.
  • Economics of crime: immigration and crime; the impact of unemployment when leaving school on subsequent criminal behaviour; the causal effect of education.

Publications

CEP discussion papers
Immigrant downgrading: new evidence from UK panel data

We examine the wage and occupation outcomes for cohorts of immigrants who arrived in the UK since 2002. Using the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) with a matched migrant identifier, we can follow a 1% sample of... Read more...

Brian Bell and Philip Johnson

11 September 2024

Journal article
The decline in rent sharing

The evolution of rent sharing is studied. Based on a panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over 35 years and using excess stock market returns to patenting activity as an instrument for economic rents, t... Read more...

Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin

01 July 2024

Journal article
Where is the land of hope and glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

This paper presents a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata focusing on occupation, home ownership, and education. Four main results ... Read more...

Brian Bell, Jack Blundell and Stephen Machin

01 January 2023

Journal article
Income dynamics in the United Kingdom and the impact of the Covid-19 recession

In this paper, we use an employer-based survey of earnings and hours to set out the key patterns in UK earnings dynamics from 1975 to 2020, with a particular focus on the most recent recession. We demonstrate that (log) ... Read more...

Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom and Richard Blundell

01 December 2022

Journal article
Why does education reduce crime?

We provide a unifying empirical framework to study why crime reductions occurred due to a sequence of state-level dropout age reforms enacted between 1980 and 2010 in the United States. Because the reforms changed the sh... Read more...

Brian Bell, Rui Costa and Stephen Machin

01 March 2022

Journal article
CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

We exploit the large rise in relative performance awards in the United Kingdom over the last two decades to investigate whether these contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and firm performance. We first documen... Read more...

Brian Bell, Simone Pedemonte and John Van Reenen

01 October 2021

CEP discussion papers
This time is not so different: income dynamics during the Covid-19 recession

We use a UK employer-employee administrative earnings dataset to investigate the response of earnings and hours to business cycles. Exploiting our long panel of data from 1975 to 2020 we find wide heterogeneity in the ex... Read more...

Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom and Jack Blundell

02 September 2021

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
Where is the land of hope and glory?

Children?s chances of doing well at school, going to university, getting a good job and owning a house are strongly influenced by their parents? education, occupation and home ownership ? but what about the impact of whe... Read more...

Brian Bell, Jack Blundell and Stephen Machin

02 November 2020

CEP Covid-19 analyses
What can previous recessions tell us about the Covid-19 downturn?

The labour market effects of the Covid-19 crisis measured as of June 2020 are compared with the three most recent UK recessions: the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the downturn induced by the global financial crisis i... Read more...

Brian Bell, Mihai Codreanu and Stephen Machin

17 August 2020

Blog
The Covid-19 recession is creating a crisis of inequality

Earnings may be affected differently by age, gender, and firm size, with large cuts for the young in small firms, write Brian Bell, Nick Bloom, Jack Blundell, and Luigi Pistaferri... Read more...

Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom and Jack Blundell

18 April 2020

Blog
Covid-19 and wages: prepare for large cuts if you are younger and work in a small firm

Brian Bell, Nick Bloom, Jack Blundell, and Luigi Pistaferri estimate how the ongoing pandemic may impact earnings by age group, gender, and firm size. The data suggests that young men working in small firms could see ear... Read more...

Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom, Jack Blundell and Luigi Pistaferri

08 April 2020

Blog
Prepare for large wage cuts if you are younger and work in a small firm

The COVID-19 pandemic is turning into a global recession - probably the biggest drop in economic activity since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This column uses over 3 million earnings observations drawn from more tha... Read more...

Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom, Jack Blundell and Luigi Pistaferri

06 April 2020

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
Workers' falling share of firms' profits

To what extent do UK companies share their profits with employees? Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin find that rent-sharing is on a much smaller scale today than during the 1980s and 1990s ? and that the decl... Read more...

Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin

01 July 2019

CEP discussion papers
Where is the Land of Hope and Glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For England and Wales, a paucity of data has made this a difficult question to reliably answer. This paper p... Read more...

Brian Bell, Jack Blundell and Stephen Machin

20 December 2018

CEP discussion papers
Rent sharing and inclusive growth

The long-run evolution of rent sharing is empirically studied. Based upon a comprehensive and harmonized panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over thirty five years, the paper reports evidence of a sign... Read more...

Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin

27 November 2018

CEP discussion papers
Why does education reduce crime?

Prior research shows reduced criminality to be a beneficial consequence of education policies that raise the school leaving age. This paper studies how crime reductions occurred in a sequence of state-level dropout age r... Read more...

Brian Bell, Rui Costa and Stephen Machin

24 August 2018

Journal article
Crime scars: recessions and the making of career criminals

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job match... Read more...

Brian Bell, Anna Bindler and Stephen Machin

01 July 2018

CEP discussion papers
Pension shocks and wages

How do wages respond to firm-level idiosyncratic cost shocks? We create a unique dataset that links longitudinal data on workers? compensation to the unexpected costs that UK firms have been forced to pay to plug large d... Read more...

Pawel Adrjan and Brian Bell

27 March 2018

Journal article
Minimum wages and firm value

How does the value of a firm change in response to a minimum wage hike? The evidence we have to date is not well-suited to answer this question, principally because events that have been studied are not completely unknow... Read more...

Brian Bell and Stephen Machin

01 January 2018

Journal article
Top earnings inequality and the gender pay gap: Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

This paper explores the consequences of the under-representation of women in top jobs for the overall gender pay gap. Using administrative annual earnings data from Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, it applies the ... Read more...

Brian Bell, Michael J. Bohm and P Fortin

01 October 2017

Journal article
Crime, compulsory schooling laws and education

Do compulsory schooling laws reduce crime? Previous evidence for the US from the 1960s and 1970s suggests they do, primarily working through their effect on educational attainment to generate a causal impact on crime. In... Read more...

Brian Bell, Rui Costa and Stephen Machin

01 October 2016

CEP discussion papers
CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

Would moving to relative performance contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and performance? To address this, we exploit the large rise in relative performance awards and the share of equity pay in the UK over ... Read more...

Brian Bell, Simone Pedemonte and John Van Reenen

12 July 2016

CEP discussion papers
Minimum wages and firm value

How does the value of a firm change in response to a minimum wage hike? The evidence we have to date is not well-suited to answer this question, principally because events that have been studied are not completely unknow... Read more...

Brian Bell and Stephen Machin

29 January 2016

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
Wage stagnation and the legacy costs of employment

Although UK real wages have been stagnant for over a decade, there has been a notable increase in nonwage compensation. But as Brian Bell reveals, this rise consists largely of special payments to fund deficit gaps in '... Read more...

Brian Bell

06 November 2015

CEP discussion papers
Crime, compulsory schooling laws and education

Do compulsory schooling laws reduce crime? Previous evidence for the U.S. from the 1960s and 1970s suggests they do, primarily working through their effect on educational attainment to generate a causal impact on crime. ... Read more...

Brian Bell, Rui Costa and Stephen Machin

01 October 2015

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
Crime scars: can recessions produce career criminals?

Recessions typically raise youth unemployment and leave longterm labour market `scars? on the young people concerned. Research by Brian Bell, Anna Bindler and Stephen Machin finds that they also have a disturbing and sub... Read more...

Brian Bell, Anna Bindler and Stephen Machin

30 July 2015

CEP election analysis papers
#ElectionEconomics: The Research Evidence on Key Issues for Voters in the 2015 UK General Election

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigratio... Read more...

Ghazala Azmat, Brian Bell, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezlepretre, Swati Dhingra, Christian A. L. Hilber, Stephen Machin, Alan Manning, Ralf Martin, Alistair McGuire, Sandra McNally, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Henry G. Overman, Isabelle Roland, Thomas Sampson, Anna Valero, John Van Reenen, Jonathan Wadsworth, Gill Wyness and Gabriel Zucman

30 April 2015

CEP election analysis papers
Fighting Crime: Can the Police do more with less?

The coalition government's austerity programme has resulted in some sizeable reductions in the police workforce, yet crime has continued to fall. A key question for the next Parliament is whether further real-terms reduc... Read more...

Brian Bell

21 April 2015

CEP discussion papers
Crime scars: recessions and the making of career criminals

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job match... Read more...

Brian Bell, Anna Bindler and Stephen Machin

14 July 2014

Journal article
Crime deterrence: evidence from the London 2011 riots

Significant riots occurred in London in August 2011. The riots took place in highly localised geographical areas, with crime going up hugely in the affected sub-wards. The criminal justice response was to make sentencing... Read more...

Brian Bell, Laura Jaitman and Stephen Machin

01 May 2014

Journal article
Bankers and their bonuses

We analyse the role of financial sector workers in the huge rise of the share of earnings going to those at the very top of the pay distribution in the UK. Rising bankers' bonuses accounted for two-thirds of the increase... Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

01 February 2014

Journal article
Crime and immigration: evidence from large immigrant waves

This paper focuses on empirical connections between crime and immigration, studying two large waves of recent UK immigration (the late 1990s/early 2000s asylum seekers and the post-2004 inflow from EU accession countries... Read more...

Brian Bell, Francesco Fasani and Stephen Machin

01 October 2013

CEP occasional papers
Bankers and their bonuses

The pay of financial sector workers (?bankers?) is a focus of public concern especially since the onset of the financial crisis. We document the remarkable rise in the share of aggregate pay going to those at the very to... Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

18 February 2013

CEP occasional papers
Extreme wage inequality: pay at the very top

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the UK. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top o... Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

04 February 2013

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
In brief... UK chief executives: paid for performance?

Does it matter whether you work for a successful company? And if so, does it matter who you are? To answer these questions we construct a unique panel dataset covering the pay of all CEOs, senior managers and a fully rep... Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

21 May 2012

CEP discussion papers
Immigrant Enclaves and Crime

There is conflicting evidence on the consequences of immigrant neighbourhood segregation for individual outcomes, with various studies finding positive, negative or insubstantial effects. In this paper, we document the e... Read more...

Brian Bell and Stephen Machin

12 December 2011

Government consultations
BIS - Executive Remuneration Discussion Paper

Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

17 November 2011

CEP discussion papers
Firm Performance and Wages: Evidence from Across the Corporate Hierarchy

Does it matter whether you work for a successful company? And if so, does it matter who you are? To answer these questions we construct a unique panel dataset covering the pay of all CEOs, senior managers and a fully rep... Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

03 November 2011

CEP discussion papers
Crime and Immigration: Evidence from Large Immigrant Waves

This paper examines the relationship between immigration and crime in a setting where large migration flows offer an opportunity to carefully appraise whether the populist view that immigrants cause crime is borne out by... Read more...

Brian Bell, Francesco Fasani and Stephen Machin

01 June 2010

CEP reports
Bankers' Pay and Extreme Wage Inequality in the UK

It is well known that the distribution of income in the United Kingdom has widened considerably in the last three decades. This rise has been a result of a widening at both the top and bottom of the wage distribution. Mo... Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

01 April 2010

CEP election analysis papers
Bankers' Bonuses

Read more...

Brian Bell

01 April 2010

CEP discussion papers
Wage Equations, Wage Curves and All That

This paper is concerned with the relationship between wages and unemployment. Using UK regions and individuals as the basis for our analysis, the following questions are investigated. First, is the wage equation a relati... Read more...

Brian Bell, Stephen Nickell and Glenda Quintini

01 September 2000

CEP discussion papers
Would Cutting Payroll Taxes on the Unskilled Have a Significant Effect on Unemployment?

This paper states two recommendations from an OECD Report: (1) 'Reduce non-wage labour costs, especially in Europe, by reducing taxes on laboura' (2) 'Reduce direct taxes (social security and income taxes) on those with ... Read more...

Brian Bell and Stephen Nickell

01 February 1996

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