Study, Work, Progress, Repeat? How and why pay and progression outcomes have differed across cohorts

This paper is the fifth report for the Intergenerational Commission, which was launched in the summer of 2016 to explore questions of intergenerational fairness that are currently rising up the agenda and make recommendations for repairing the intergenerational social contract. It attempts to understand the concerning finding that millennials who have entered work so far have made no earnings progress on generation X before them. It does this by exploring the population and jobs market changes that underpin these faltering cohort-on-cohort earnings improvements, and the mechanisms via which year-on-year increases in cohorts’ pay have slowed down.