Professor Emeritus Brian Nolan

Brian Nolan is Professor of Social Policy Emeritus at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College Oxford. From 2014 up to retirement from the University in September 2024 he directed the collaborative research programme on economic inequality research programme at the Department and the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. Before coming to Oxford he was Principal of the College of Human Sciences and Professor of Public Policy at University College Dublin and previously Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin. View Professor Nolan's full CV. 

He has been actively involved in a range of collaborative, cross-country research networks and projects, including the Growing Inequalities’ Impacts (GINI) multi-country research project on inequalities and their impacts. He co-edited The Handbook of Economic Inequality (2008), The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income (2013), Changing Inequalities in Rich Countries: Analytical and Comparative Perspectives (2014), Changing Inequalities and Societal Impacts in Rich Countries: Thirty Countries’ Experiences (2014), and Children of Austerity: The Impact of the Great Recession on Child Poverty in Rich Countries (2017). Additionally, he co-authored Poverty and Deprivation in Europe (2011) with Christopher T. Whelan. All of these works were published by Oxford University Press.

The research programme on economic inequality at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and the Institute for New Economic Thinking was initially established as the Employment, Equity and Growth programme, supported by the Resolution Foundation from 2014 to 2018. The main findings were compiled into two volumes, which he edited and published with Oxford University Press in 2018: Inequality and Inclusive Growth in Rich Countries: Shared Challenges and Contrasting Fortunes and Generating Prosperity for Working Families in Rich Countries. From 2016 to 2021, he directed the   Oxford Martin Programme on Inequality and Prosperity, supported by Citi as part of its research partnership with the Oxford Martin School. This programme focused on the drivers of inequality, strategies to address it, and ways to promote inclusive growth, while also exploring a range of related topics. Additionally, he served as the principal investigator on a project funded by the Nuffield Foundation from 2017 to 2019, which examined the intergenerational transmission of family wealth.

More recently, the inequality research programme has been primarily funded through a 6-year Synergy Grant from the European Research Council for Towards Distributional National Accounts (ERC grant 856455 DINA), in collaboration with Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics) and Emmanuel Saez (University of California, Berkeley). Running from 2020 to 2027, the programme's central aim is to bridge the gap between distributional data available from micro sources and national accounts aggregates, providing estimates of income and wealth distribution using concepts consistent with macroeconomic national accounts. The Oxford team is also investigating related topics, including the measurement and role of state redistribution, the intergenerational transmission of income, wealth, poverty, and social class, as well as methodologies for ‘correcting’ surveys for missing income and wealth. Additionally, their research explores inequality and social status, economic inequality (including unemployment) and political behaviour, and the interactions between demographic trends and income and wealth inequality. 

View a full list of publications from the research programme from 2014.