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We are deeply saddened to hear that CEP associate Ghazala Azmat, Professor of Economics at Sciences Po, passed away on Saturday, 7 June. Ghazala was a leading applied microeconomist, known for her work on labour markets,... Read more...
10 June 2025
Congratulations to Almudena Sevilla, professor of economics and public policy in LSE’s Department of Social Policy, and associate of the Centre for Economic Performance who has been recognised in the New Year's Hon... Read more...
06 January 2025
Alan Manning offers insights on trends in workers switching or leaving jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic. ... Read more...
17 November 2021
Report on research by Dr Claudia Hupkau and Barbara Petrongolo which suggests the coronavirus outbreak is widening the gender gap in the workplace and at home. ... Read more...
14 May 2020
This column combines survey data from the UK with occupation classifications to show that that – unlike previous recessions – the current crisis is harming women’s labour market prospects mor... Read more...
22 April 2020
A team that included two Northwestern researchers - Sapienza and David Figlio, dean of the School of Education and Social Policy—conducted two analyses to examine whether a family’s attitude toward boys and girls cou... Read more...
21 October 2019
Research by Nick Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying on Ctrip in China showed a 13.5 per cent rise in worker productivity through work from home policies as employees completed their full shift of wor... Read more...
28 June 2019
However, pay varies among different sectors, which contributes to an earnings gap between men and women, write Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura. ... Read more...
21 May 2019
There is growing concern that human jobs are being replaced by the rapid technological progress of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and automation (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017, Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, Ford 20... Read more...
14 April 2019
Robots are already driving productivity. Investment in robots contributed to 10 percent of GDP growth per capita in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from 1993 to 2016.5 There is also... Read more...
08 April 2019
Robots increase productivity when used for tasks that perform more efficiently and at a higher and more stable level of quality than people. In a research focused on robotics for the Center for Economic Performance at th... Read more...
05 April 2019
And a review of studies by a Boston College economist Christina Olivetti and British colleague Barbara Petrongolo showed that nearly all developed nations have some form of subsidized early-childhood education. The U.S. ... Read more...
27 March 2019
However, the phenomenon that has promoted the economic viability of new technology around the world has been the reduction of prices. According to Graetz and Michaels [5], the price of industrial robots has been reduced ... Read more...
26 March 2019
However, women inventors made up only 12% of all inventors on patents granted in 2016 - the most recent year for which data is available - according to the patent office. That disparity is not a good sign and even hurts... Read more...
Research indicates that universal child care might encourage people to have children. Spending on Research indicates that universal child care might encourage people to have children. Spending on early-childhood programs... Read more...
26 February 2019
Research indicates that universal child care might encourage people to have children. Spending on early-childhood programs tends to be related to an increase in fertility and a decrease in the gender wage gap, economists... Read more...
Claudia Olivetti at Boston College and Barbara Petrongolo at Queen Mary University of London found little evidence that extended leaves had a positive effect on women's employment or earnings - but found that subsidized ... Read more...
25 January 2019
Wellbeing Programme research by CEP Associate Grace Lordan is discussed, looking at the societal and childhood impacts on gendered sorting patterns.... Read more...
07 November 2018
By Maria Molina-Domene Why do small establishments pay employees less than large establishments? The final pieces of this puzzle have not been found yet. This paper suggests the joint role of the division o... Read more...
27 July 2018
Academics in the Surrey Business School at the University of Surrey have received a research grant from the Department of Health and Social Care to study causes of the gender pay gap in the medical profession.... Read more...
29 May 2018
In the 'Year of Engineering', engineering skills are taking centre stage and the Skills Commission inquiry, which is co-chaired by Lucy Allan MP, Preet Gill MP and Professor Sandra McNally, is taking e... Read more...
23 May 2018
The Treasury could also look to academia. Tenreyro sits on the board of the Womens’ Committee of the Royal Economic Society, where her colleagues include Bristol University’s Sarah Smith, Grace Lor... Read more...
14 May 2018
Article by Sandra McNally Engineering is an area that’s historically been dominated by men. Sandra McNally is leading an inquiry into how to massively widen women’s participation in this vital a... Read more...
10 May 2018
The Economist's Soumaya Keynes continues her quest to find out why the study of economics is so dominated by men. Does that affect the kind of economics we get, and why does that matter? In her second prog... Read more...
08 May 2018
The annual American Economic Journal (AEJ) Best Paper Award highlights the best paper published in each of the American Economic Journals: Applied Economics, Economic Policy, Macroeconomics, and Microeconomics... Read more...
07 May 2018
Jordi Blanes i Vidal, a professor at the London School of Economics, said such a system would work best in areas such as sales where there are clear markers of performance. He said: 'But in s... Read more...
01 April 2018
In a paper he signed with John Van Reenen, Neviana Petkova, Xavier Jaravel and Alex Bell it was discovered that people with parents who are among the richest 1% of the United States are ten times more likely t... Read more...
14 February 2018
Article by by Xavier Jaravel, Raj Chetty, John Van Reenen and Alexander Bell A new analysis shows how much the socioeconomic status of a student's family influences whether he becomes an inventor a... Read more...
11 February 2018
...Our first finding is that there are large differences in innovation rates by socioeconomic class, race and gender. Using new de-identified data that allows us to track 1.2 million inventors from birth to ad... Read more...
25 January 2018
Article by Xavier Jaravel, Raj Chetty, John Van Reenen and Alexander Bell A new analysis shows how family background influences who grows up to invent. The key to turning things around? Expose kids to more ... Read more...
24 January 2018
CEO pay is quickly outpacing gyours. In 2016, the CEOs of the top 350 U.S. firms earned on average $15.6 million. “There are CEOs getting paid hundreds of millions,” Stanford economics profes... Read more...
22 January 2018
While there could be many factors hobbling innovation, findings of a recent study by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen—who are associated with various American i... Read more...
29 December 2017
It is no secret that innovation is a powerful driver of growth in any modern economy. How does a country promote innovation activity? A recent study by economists Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana... Read more...
25 December 2017
Article by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen: Relatively little is known about the factors that induce people to become inventors. Using data on the lives of over... Read more...
24 December 2017
How about the notion that smarts determine life success? That idea too has come under assault from recent research. A recent paper by economists Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John... Read more...
12 December 2017
At nearly 326,000, the number of new U.S. patents has more than doubled from 2005 to 2015. But in every year since 2008, the patents granted to foreign inventors have outpaced those of U.S. inventors... Read more...
11 December 2017
There’s a lot of inequality affecting where innovation comes from, according to a new study from the Equality of Opportunity Project. “There are very large gaps in innovation by income, race, and g... Read more...
05 December 2017
The discrepancy in who gets patents is not the result of innate abilities, Chetty and his team, Alex Bell of Harvard, Xavier Jaravel of the London School of Economics, Neviana Petkova of the U.S. Treasury Depa... Read more...
04 December 2017
New research from Raj Chetty and his Equality of Opportunity team shows a significant amount of inequality in innovation. Even controlling for ability, their results show that there is less patenting from low-... Read more...
…For this reason, societies have a big interest in making sure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to become scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs. It’s not only a matter of fai... Read more...
03 December 2017
However, not everyone agrees with the rhetoric emerging from the US regarding the failings of its workforce. Alan Manning, Professor of Economics at LSE argues: “The retraining process tends to work best... Read more...
31 October 2017
"Money is not the only thing affecting people’s happiness; it's not remotely the whole story," said British economist Baron Richard Layard in 2014. "People must understand that they wo... Read more...
17 October 2017
… the share price of companies did worse than the company's ceo who actually paid less than average so if anything what you see now is actually pay for underperformance that us companies and there&#... Read more...
06 October 2017
Women’s role in the US economy has exploded since WWII. In fact, the employment rate for women of prime working age more than doubled in the second half of the 20th century. There are a lot of reaso... Read more...
04 October 2017
Higher skill levels among London’s workforce explains about two-thirds of the productivity gap between the capital and the rest of the country, according to Henry Overman, director of the What Works Cent... Read more...
03 September 2017
…A paper in the latest American Economic Review (AER) provides an intriguing perspective on the issue. Tim Besley of the LSE and two Swedish colleagues carried out a very detailed empirical analysis ... Read more...
16 August 2017
Researchers are divided on whether bad jobs are worse for wellbeing than unemployment, write Tony Beatton, Paul Frijters and Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthavee Given a generally stronger social norm for men to be ... Read more...
04 August 2017
snippet… As can be seen, at the end of all this we have fallen into the trap, after accounting for the number of men and women. Is this relevant when it comes to funding an international scientifi... Read more...
30 July 2017
The historical growth in the service sector has created jobs for which women have a natural comparative advantage, write Rachel Ngai and Barbara Petrongolo ..There has been a vast amount of research on the ... Read more...
28 July 2017
Article by Jonathan Wadsworth The issue of public sector pay went centre-stage recently in the debate over whether to lift the public sector pay cap. Presumably one of the key factors, alongside where the r... Read more...
25 July 2017
See this study by Joao Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen. This article was published online by the Bloomberg Gadfly blog on September 2, 2016 Link to article here Related Publications Decoupling of Wage Growth and... Read more...
02 September 2016
For the past decade, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and a rotating crew of co-authors (most consistently MIT's John Van Reenen) have been documenting that the management best practices developed at high-performing com... Read more...
22 August 2016
New initiatives planned to end 'unacceptable and unlawful' discrimination against working women Employers are being told to do more to help mothers breastfeed their babies at work, as part of the government's latest i... Read more...
15 August 2016
Working mothers in low-skilled jobs are being forced to either considerably reduce their hours or give up work altogether after having a second child, according to a wide-ranging study that suggests lack of access to chi... Read more...
08 August 2016
The addition of a second child can put families under serious financial strain - and in the case of women on the lowest incomes - convince them to give up work altogether in the face of rising childcare costs, a new st... Read more...
07 August 2016
A new study finds that, while the addition of a second child has little effect on the working hours of mothers in skilled jobs, it has a substantial and negative effect on low-skilled women who are forced to reduce their... Read more...
06 August 2016
Article by Brian Bell and John Van Reenen Lacklustre growth seems to be the new normal almost everywhere in the world except for one area - CEO pay. This column uses data on UK publicly listed firms to examine whether ... Read more...
05 August 2016
Brian Bell and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance have carried out a similar exercise looking at top bosses' pay at 500 large listed UK companies between 1999 and 2014. Unl... Read more...
27 July 2016
And if income inequality were not related to our kind, our ethnicity or our level of education, but rather to our workplace? Some employers pay better than others. And the gap between those who pay well and those who pay... Read more...
21 July 2016
Article by Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer Gender gaps in earnings exist in high-skill industries despite male and female workers having similar educational backgrounds. This column uses evidence from the legal industry t... Read more...
12 July 2016
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of economic inequality has been the role that firms play in it. It's safe to say that a significant part of the growing gap in how well different firms pay can be attributed to the lat... Read more...
11 May 2016
In an article entitled 'Be happy, pay more to the taxman', Professor Richard Layard argues that it is the income gap, rather than total wealth that is most pertinent to people's happiness. Studies show, writes Layard, th... Read more...
08 March 2016
Corporate greed isn't good, but it might not be as bad for inequality as we thought - or at least not in the way we thought. Now it seems pretty obvious that inequality must have something to do with executive pay. After... Read more...
29 May 2015
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15 April 2015
Girls in French secondary schools are benefiting from a marking bias by maths teachers, finds research. The girls were given 6 percent higher marks than boys for similar work, says the study by the London School of Econo... Read more...
14 April 2015
According to one academic paper, about a quarter of Britain's productivity gap with America can be put down to poor management. The main weakness is that too many of Britain's family-owned firms still prefer primogenitur... Read more...
11 April 2015
The economist Alan Manning recently gave a public lecture at the London School of Economics, where he drew parallels between the Equal Pay Act and the minimum wage, pointing out that in both cases theoretical concerns we... Read more...
27 March 2015
ESRC-funded research provided crucial evidence for the introduction of a UK National Minimum Wage in 1999, encompassing 1.3 million workers in 2013. The research was cited prior to minimum wage legislation in Hong Kong i... Read more...
19 January 2015
Barbara Petrongolo will take over from Joseph Zweimuller as Director of the Labour Economics Programme from 1 August 2015. Barbara is Professor of Economics at Queen Mary University and Research Associate at the Centre... Read more...
11 November 2014
Permanent low pay threatens to overtake us, with the Treasury, hit by lower tax receipts, facing an ever-rising benefits bill. On Wednesday Steve Machin, research director at the LSE's centre for economic performance,... Read more...
23 October 2014
Article by Alex Bryson and Arnaud Chevalier This column presents evidence from a new test of taste-based discrimination. Examining hiring decisions in the English Fantasy Premier League, the authors do not find that emp... Read more...
18 August 2014
...di due ricercatrici di origine italiana che lavorano all'estero, Barbara Petrongolo (London School of Economics) e Claudia Olivetti (Boston University). Sulla stessa lunghezza d'onda anche Daniela... In Italy, the... Read more...
08 July 2014
Publicly traded companies are the engine behind China's growth, which raises the question of how CEO compensation works under an interventionist state. This column presents an analysis of executive compensation in China ... Read more...
24 June 2014
Economist Alan Manning of the London School of Economics also found that the pace of the declines in the pay gap has slowed down, and that working women could make less than men for the next 150 years due to discriminati... Read more...
02 April 2014
Over a whole career, men in the public sector will earn the same as their commercial peers - and women will do better. It is essential that any proposed reforms of the total remuneration package available to current and... Read more...
01 October 2012
Executive Pay: Share ownership by institutional investors improves the link to corporate performance Publicly quoted UK firms with higher levels of institutional ownership of their shares have a stronger and mo... Read more...
04 May 2012
Research carried out by Brian Bell and John Van Reenen at the LSE has found that the performance of firms could explain between one-quarter and one-half of the rise in the gap between the pay of workers and chief execu... Read more...
08 November 2011