In April this year, we published Riders on the Storm, an analysis of how middle income households fared in the four years since the financial crisis in 2007.
We used the Family Resources Survey and the British Household Panel Survey in this work. The latter is a longitudinal survey that allows us to track the income and expenditure of the same households over time. This provides, among other things, useful evidence about income mobility. It also allows us to track the incomes of the same households over time.
In our new work, we have extended the analysis, going back in four year steps to capture how middle income households were doing in 2003 and 1999. To be clear on terms, by middle income households, we refer literally to households in the middle 20% of the income distribution. We also look at other quintiles for comparative purposes.