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To understand what is happening to inequality between people we need to understand the behaviour of, and inequality between, firms. Papers published last month as part of the IFS Deaton Review of inequality in work, led ... Read more...
25 April 2022
Study by LSE's Richard Davies finds price volatility during the Covid-19 pandemic has been higher than in any comparable period since 1991. ... Read more...
05 February 2021
Thomas Sampson If Brexit is a divorce, then Northern Ireland is a child at the centre of a messy custody fight. The new Brexit deal seeks to solve the Irish border problem through joint custody. Whether Northern Ireland... Read more...
26 October 2019
A new data set helps address the lack of innovation data able to capture firms' internal mechanisms and behaviours, write Max Nathan and Anna Cecilia Rosso. What Works Well Centre for Economic Growth... Read more...
02 October 2019
Work by the OECD and Oxford Martin School also notes widening gaps in productivity and profit mark-ups between the leading businesses and the rest. This suggests weakening competition and rising monopoly rent. Moreover, ... Read more...
18 September 2019
On Brexit and the potential future trading options for the UK and the EU27. This interview was part of a larger piece for the 6 o'clock news programme. ... Read more...
17 September 2019
The winners of the 2019 WTO Essay Award for Young Economists are Jan Bakker of Oxford University and Federico Huneeus of Princeton University, who were ranked in equal first place by the Selection Panel. They will share ... Read more...
12 September 2019
More structured managerial practices have a strong relationship with firm productivity, writes Daniela Scur. ... Read more...
09 September 2019
As Brexit nears (again), are British firms choosing to invest in the UK or in other European markets? Are European firms investing in the UK to preserve access to its markets? And has "global Britain" got off the drawing... Read more...
16 August 2019
It can be seen from the strikes in Taiwan in recent years that for the company's top management, only shareholders are the most important targets for care. It is like giving them more benefits. But the British media The ... Read more...
12 August 2019
The study conducted by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve tries to shed light on the relationship between well-being and company performance. ... Read more...
22 July 2019
This week's guest blog comes from Christian Krekel, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, working with George Ward from MIT Sloan and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve from Oxford Unive... Read more...
17 July 2019
John Van Reenen, MIT, discusses work he has done on how 'superstar firms' such as Google and Apple have changed the global economy. The superstars, although big, employ relatively few workers and this has contributed to ... Read more...
16 July 2019
Nicholas Bloom of Stanford made an analogy with a quite different arena: "Barcelona does not pick its team based on being born in Barcelona—if it did it would not win anything. The ECB should also pick the best." So to... Read more...
05 July 2019
Free trade is not necessarily efficient when larger, more productive firms can charge higher markups than smaller, less productive ones, write Antonella Nocco, Gianmarco Ottaviano and Matteo Salto. ... Read more...
24 June 2019
"The striking fact is that over time, people simply do not adapt to being unemployed," says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, an associate professor of economics and strategy at Oxford University and associate editor of th... Read more...
17 June 2019
Dr Swati Dhingra, assistant professor at the London School of Economics, specialising in globalisation and industrial policy, says there's not enough trained staff to power it. "Compared to other creative or tech-based ... Read more...
20 May 2019
Brexit affects domestic firms, too. In January Barclays bank received legal approval to move €190bn ($213bn) of assets to Dublin, fearing no-deal. The London School of Economics recently found the Brexit vote had ca... Read more...
09 May 2019
Dr Anna Valero, innovation fellow at the London School of Economics, said the results of the funding would inform local and national governments to improve access to technology.... Read more...
06 May 2019
Workers in the agricultural sector are among the most vulnerable to being paid below the minimum wage and HMRC needs to be more proactive in punishing non-compliant businesses, a leading employment expert has warned. ... Read more...
03 May 2019
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01 May 2019
Economists David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, Christina Patterson and John Van Reenen, who wrote one of the first papers to bring attention to the phenomenon of rising concentration, also endorse a story of so-calle... Read more...
26 April 2019
A growing number of companies place a high priority on the wellbeing of their workers, assuming that happier workers will lead to improved productivity. This column examines this link based on a meta-analysis of independ... Read more...
21 April 2019
Less efficiency and lower profitability for firms carry lessons for Britain and the US, write Kilian Huber, Volker Lindenthal and Fabian Waldinger. Talented individuals are often excluded from leadership positions if th... Read more...
16 April 2019
A company's performance during and after a recession depends not just on the decisions it makes but also on who makes them. In a 2017 study, Raffaella Sadun (of Harvard Business School), Philippe Aghion (of College de Fr... Read more...
Original information: Chiara Criscuolo, Ralf Martin, Henry G. Overman, John Van Reenen. Some Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy. American Economic Review, 2019, 109(1): 48-85. Governments around the world provide la... Read more...
14 April 2019
Snippet: ...according to a study by the London School of Economics British companies have delivered almost 11 billion dollars worth of new investment away from Britain through the EU since the Brexit vote so UK firms hik... Read more...
01 April 2019
Snippet: ...A fall in the pound increases the costs of UK imports, and in the year after the vote consumer prices rose rapidly. Analysis from 2017 by researchers at the Centre for Economic Performance estimated that the ... Read more...
Snippet: ... so what does the investment picture look like in the UK since the referendum in June 20 16th government figures show that last year business investment fell slightly by 0.4% to around 247 billion dollars acc... Read more...
Secondly, workers are not being displaced by new technology. Business investment has fallen since 2016. There are countless reasons for this, many of them longstanding structural ones. One, which might have become more i... Read more...
29 March 2019
Meanwhile, a very interesting new paper by economists Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Gilbert Cette, Remy Lecat and Helene Maghin looks at the relationship between credit constraints and productivity at the level of i... Read more...
27 March 2019
25 March 2019
Arguably, it is also simply getting harder to innovate. As economists Nick Bloom, Chad Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb argue, .... ... Read more...
10 March 2019
09 March 2019
But according to a forthcoming paper from Felipe Carozzi, Christian Hilber and Xiaolun Yu of the London School of Economics, the clearest impact of Help to Buy has been to raise house prices, potentially by as much as 5 ... Read more...
Ben Chu, Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight, showed a graph on FDI outflows from the UK (actual vs. expected) on BBC2 Newsnight on 07 March 2019. This graph is taken from CEP Brexit Analysis No. 13, Figure 2. 19:20min ... Read more...
07 March 2019
By Nicholas Bloom Scott Ohlmacher Cristina Tello-Trillo Melanie Wallskog For 2010 and 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau fielded the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) in partnership with a research team of... Read more...
06 March 2019
Economists believe "firms are more productive if they're in larger cities" says Henry Overman, a Professor of Economic Geography at the LSE. What Works Well Centre for Economic Growth ... Read more...
04 March 2019
"One of the features of these very big firms is that they've got high profits but they have low labor shares," said John Van Reenen, an economics ... [paywall] ... Read more...
23 February 2019
UK companies have increased their investments into the EU by $10.73bn due to Brexit uncertainty diverting investment from the domestic market, says a recent study from the London School of Economics' (LSE) Centre for Eco... Read more...
21 February 2019
But recent research by economists Nikhil Datta, Giulia Giupponi and Stephen Machin suggests that undesired zero-hours contracts may have become more prevalent because of minimum wage hikes. [paywall] ... Read more...
15 February 2019
The fall is more pronounced among companies that enjoy high market power, write Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin. ... Read more...
11 February 2019
The referendum result led to a 12 percent increase in foreign direct investment transactions from Britain into the EU between mid-2016 and September 2018, researchers from the London School of Economics' Centre for Econo... Read more...
A new study looks at the long-run evolution of rent sharing between companies and workers in the UK and finds that rent sharing has significantly decreased between 2001 and 2016, particularly among companies that enjoy m... Read more...
08 February 2019
One little-known study could, however, help shed light on where the problem really lies. According to Professors Bell and Van Reenen of the LSE, the real issue is not that CEO pay has been inflated, but that worker pay h... Read more...
29 January 2019
A British study estimated the impact of public subsidies in regions in difficulty. If a gain for the job was found but the big companies, first beneficiaries, do not change their behavior, notes the professor of economy ... Read more...
14 January 2019
John Van Reenen argues that competent managers are desperately undervalued in the UK. The MIT economics professor, who until recently headed the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance, concedes that most studies ... Read more...
08 December 2018
The majority of businesses in the UK report that Brexit is a source of uncertainty. This column uses survey responses from around 3,000 businesses to evaluate the level and impact of this uncertainty. It finds that Brexi... Read more...
25 November 2018
The danger of nepotism Professor John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks nepotism is a key risk. A 2011 study authored by Reenen, with Nicholas Bloom and Raffaella Sadun, found that those fa... Read more...
22 November 2018
There is a rise of an innovative elite that is an engine of efficiency. Its members are companies that have mastered digital technologies and enjoy network effects that help them fend off slower competitors, says John Va... Read more...
15 November 2018
Left-behind places are lending themselves increasingly to the forces of populism and political disintegration, writes Riccardo Crescenzi. A complex flow of investment is spreading across the globe, connecting more a... Read more...
07 November 2018
Research by CEP Economists Nikhil Datta, Giulia Giupponi and Stephen Machin. "A report recently undertaken by three labour market economists has found that 44% of workers on zero-hours contracts would like more workin... Read more...
13 October 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
There is a “lack of self-awareness among lots of firms,” says John Van Reenen, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Some think they are awesome. But they are ... Read more...
15 July 2018
09 July 2018
One problem in assessing the impact of management is that it is an amorphous and multifaceted category, including a variety of possible activities. This problem has been addressed by the work of economists lik... Read more...
07 July 2018
Article by Maria Molina-Domene: Reputation plays an important signalling role in an imperfect information world and companies endeavour to preserve it. In this study, I evaluate empirically the role of reputat... Read more...
21 June 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
We must go back in time to grasp this issue, both economic and societal. According to researcher Nicholas Bloom, the profound technological and structural change that has transformed business operations in rec... Read more...
22 May 2018
Economic publications show that these effects would have a strong impact on the level of macroeconomic equilibrium and consequently on that of structural unemployment. A recent article by Luis Garicano, Claire... Read more...
04 May 2018
America’s patents and research spending have soared alongside its trade deficit with China. Article in the Economist refers to the research paper ‘ Related publications Trade Induced Te... Read more...
03 May 2018
Pointing out the weaknesses of the small business, Professor Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues developed a survey instrument for measuring business quality. According to the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Ind... Read more...
02 May 2018
22 March 2018
Even customs duties, which will help US companies in the short term, can be detrimental in the long run. This protection of the domestic market can lead to a decline in qualitative competitiveness. In this con... Read more...
06 March 2018
Using tariffs to restore American competitiveness could easily backfire. If U.S. companies can hunker behind trade barriers and sell to a captive market, many will lose their edge. Research by economists Nicho... Read more...
05 March 2018
03 March 2018
All in the Family? CEO Choice and Firm Organization, by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, is the first study showing a causal link between dynastic family firms and poorer ... Read more...
01 March 2018
The share of start-ups in employment in the United States has been declining since 1980. This is in line with that of David Autor and his coauthors on the rise of superstars, David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence ... Read more...
24 February 2018
24 January 2018
Research shows the first causal evidence that dynastic family firms have worse management practices, writes Daniela Scur We push the literature forward in two main ways: first, we show the first causal evid... Read more...
18 January 2018
Fortunately, in an age when data is king, there are increasing amounts of facts and figures to illustrate the problem. A paper published earlier this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology'... Read more...
27 December 2017
24 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...
05 December 2017
04 December 2017
03 December 2017
The Centre for Economic Performance has published a discussion paper entitled 'Product Diversification in Indian Manufacturing.'The abstract states: The presence of global value chains challenges ... Read more...
08 November 2017
With Swati Dhingra, Martin Donnelly and Sam Lowe - Chaired by Soumaya Keynes Trading places: #BrexitTrade conference video: What types of trade barriers are most important for UK firms with an eye ... Read more...
02 November 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
Sie hat zur Folge, dass der Anteil der Arbeitseinkommen am Gesamtprodukt schrumpft und die Ungleichheit zunimmt. Die Grafik unten zeigt für ausgewählte Länder, wie der Anteil der Arbeitseinkomme... Read more...
30 October 2017
The standard metric of monopoly power is the concentration ratio, or the share of the market accruing to the top four (or 20) firms. In a 2017 paper, MIT’s David Autor, Christina Patterson, and John Van ... Read more...
26 October 2017
Article by John Van Reenen. When people discuss what drives long-run productivity, they usually focus on technical change. But productivity is about more than robots, new drugs and self-driving vehicles.... Read more...
18 October 2017
But why is IT leading to winner-take-all competition? Bessen’s paper can’t answer that, however he raises two possibilities. It could be because “software development typically requires large... Read more...
05 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
"There have always been, but the increase in numbers seems to have started about 30 years ago," says MIT researcher John Michael Van Reenen, one of the proponents of this theory and co-author of the ... Read more...
29 September 2017
Recently, a lot of attention has focused on the idea that monopoly power might be causing the shift. But the famous paper that draws this connection — by David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, Christina... Read more...
25 September 2017
Article by John Van Reenen What are the costs and benefits of regulation? Most countries treat smaller firms more generously when it comes to business regulation, exempting them from some of the burdens on ... Read more...
20 September 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
New research suggests that too little competition deters investment Concentration may also hurt workers. Recent research by David Autor of MIT and four co-authors finds that “superstar” firms pa... Read more...
31 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
The digital economy is exacerbating the capital-labour disparity in global markets. A new competition authority with global remit is needed to reset the balance And, as the economists David Autor, David Dor... Read more...
20 July 2017
A similar trend can be observed at the organizational level. A recent study by Erling Bath, Alex Bryson, James Davis and Richard Freeman has shown that the spread of individual wages since the 1970s is linked ... Read more...
14 July 2017
Article by John Van Reenen with Christina Patterson Perhaps the cause is the "robbery-Apocalypse Now," that companies are replacing expensive people with cheaper machines. We suggest another... Read more...
26 June 2017
In a recent working paper presented by MIT, John Van Reenen and his co-authors document a clear global trend towards the fall in the share of income from Labour in total income. ... Read more...
23 June 2017
A new paper – by David Dorn of the University of Zurich, Lawrence Katz of Harvard University, and David Autor, Christina Patterson, and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology &ndash... Read more...
06 June 2017
Article by Ross Levine; Yona Rubinstein ISSN 0033-5533, EISSN 1531-4650. Related publications ‘In brief...'Smart and illicit': the making of a successful entrepreneur’ R... Read more...
25 May 2017
As the economists David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, and John Van Reenen show, the US industries with the fastest-growing market concentration have also seen the largest drop in la... Read more...
24 May 2017
Today’s superstar companies owe their privileged position to digital technology’s network effects, whereby a product becomes even more desirable as more people use it. And although software plat... Read more...
22 May 2017
Article by John Van Reenen and Christina Patterson In most countries, labor’s share of the national income has declined for about three decades. Why? Maybe the cause is “Robocalypse Now”&m... Read more...
21 May 2017
As the economists David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson and John Van Reenen show, the US industries with the fastest-growing market concentration have also seen the largest drop in lab... Read more...
18 May 2017
17 May 2017
New research shows that the rise of ever-larger firms means that workers are getting a shrinking slice of a slower-growing economic pie. Increasingly, labor accounts for less and less of GDP in most co... Read more...
11 May 2017
Article by John Van Reenen and Christina Patterson In America, labor’s share has been on the decline for about three decades, and it has accelerated since the turn of the century. The fall has al... Read more...
Article by John Van Reenen. Managers are more frequently the butt of jokes from TV shows like “The Office” to “Horrible Bosses,” than seen as drivers of growth. But maybe things ar... Read more...
09 May 2017
Exporters to Angola that hired managers with specific types of experience were more likely to succeed, write Giordano Mion, Luca David Opromolla and Alessandro Sforza. The enormous variation in firm perform... Read more...
26 January 2017
Article by Swati Dhingra No access to EU’s single market and replacement deals potentially decades away heightens uncertainty for UK businesses. Theresa May’s speech on Tuesday was the govern... Read more...
18 January 2017
Investors should brace themselves for more profit warnings in 2017. This isn't simply because economic growth will slow this year: economists expect an expansion of only 1.2 per cent this year after 2 p... Read more...
04 January 2017
A paper by Nicholas Bloom and others, from Stanford University, finds that well-managed firms perform better than their peers and make a greater contribution to a nation's total-factor productivity. ... Bloom and colleag... Read more...
18 September 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
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
A bad few days for the image of Britain's retail sector PARLIAMENTARY committees are normally sleepy affairs. Backbench MPs get the chance to grill the occasional bigwig. By replying to questions succinctly witnesses ty... Read more...
11 June 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
If you're reading this you probably don't need convincing, but one of the most significant milestones in economic research over the last several years was documenting empirically that it really is true. A new paper buil... Read more...
11 April 2016
The article is an in depth summary of Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen's research on the difference in management practices. Ideally, this summary highlights the key points of focus as established by the authors. Th... Read more...
07 April 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
Management is thought to play a key role in explaining this gap. In 2012, the results of a decade-long worldwide study carried out by academics at Stanford, Harvard and the LSE found the UK had more badly managed firms t... Read more...
03 March 2016
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
As the economy recovers, wages should rise and the relative cost of capital to firms should fall, which would increase the appeal of investing in productivity-enhancing technology. This, at least, is what Professors Joao... Read more...
29 January 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
The United Kingdom has discovered that its Information Economy industries could be 42 per cent larger than current estimates, with at least 70,000 extra ICT-producing companies recently captured in a recent data find ope... Read more...
28 November 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