His work includes important contributions to the fields of income and wealth distribution, inequality, poverty and taxation.
Cowell was educated at Ardingly College before entering Trinity College, Cambridge where he completed his BA (1971), MA (1975) and PhD (1977) in Economics.
Cowell was briefly Lecturer in Economics at University of Keele before moving to LSE in 1977.
[2] Cowell is the former editor of Economica, a former associate editor of Hacienda Pública Española/Revista de Economia Publica, and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economic Inequality.
He is also the Director of Distributional Analysis Research Programme at the Suntory-Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines.