Inhomogeneous Erdős-Rényi random graphs $\mathbb G_N$ on $N$ vertices in the non-dense regime are considered in this paper. The edge between the pair of vertices $\{i,j\}$ is retained with probability $\varepsilon_N\,f(\frac{i}{N},\frac{j}{N})$, $1 \leq i \neq j \leq N$, independently of other edges, where $f\colon\,[0,1] \times [0,1] \to [0,\infty)$ is a continuous function such that $f(x,y)=f(y,x)$ for all $x,y \in [0,1]$. We study the empirical distribution of both the adjacency matrix $A_N$ and the Laplacian matrix $Δ_N$ associated with $\mathbb G_N$ in the limit as $N \to \infty$ when $\lim_{N\to\infty} \varepsilon_N = 0$ and $\lim_{N\to\infty} N\varepsilon_N = \infty$. In particular, it is shown that the empirical spectral distributions of $A_N$ and $Δ_N$, after appropriate scaling and centering, converge to deterministic limits weakly in probability. For the special case where $f(x,y) = r(x)r(y)$ with $r\colon\,[0,1] \to [0,\infty)$ a continuous function, we give an explicit characterization of the limiting distributions. Furthermore, applications of the results to constrained random graphs, Chung-Lu random graphs and social networks are shown.