Labour

CentrePiece article

My must-read paper

Christopher Pissarides shares a body of research that has blended psychology with economics....Read more...

Christopher A. Pissarides

21 October 2025

CentrePiece article

Supporting new fathers, Spanish style

Use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave combined with full pay is changing norms....Read more...

Lidia Farre, Libertad Gonzalez, Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

21 October 2025

CentrePiece article

Putting a value on safety

What the pandemic reveals about the risks that people are willing to take at work....Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

21 October 2025

CentrePiece article

Skills in the age of AI

A focus on wellbeing at work can help employees thrive....Read more...

Mary O'Mahony and Christopher A. Pissarides

21 October 2025

CEP discussion paper

A new model of parental time investments: A paradigm shift for addressing gender inequality in the labor market

This paper introduces a new framework for understanding the persistence of the motherhood penalty by emphasizing the role of on-call care. Using a pseudo-panel event study based on the 2003-2022 American Time Use Survey ...Read more...

Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz, Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal, Sveva Manfredi and Almudena Sevilla

19 September 2025

CEP discussion paper

Following in the family footsteps: Incidence and returns of occupational persistence

Children often follow their parents into the same occupations. However, evidence on the economic returns of occupational persistence is scarce and understanding these outcomes and their unequal prevalence across social s...Read more...

Maria Ventura

3 September 2025

Journal article

Journal of Development Economics: Forthcoming

The firm-pay gender gap and formal sector churn over the life cycle

We find that women sorting into lower paying firms explains nearly half of the gender pay gap in South Africa. Using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal workers, we show sorting varies co...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier and Leila Gautham

1 September 2025

CEP discussion paper

Marriage and misallocation: evidence from 70 years of US history

The traditional expectation that married women should be homemakers restricts them from pursuing their comparative advantage in the labor market. I quantify the aggregate economic consequences of these marriage-specific ...Read more...

Jay Euijung Lee

20 August 2025

CEP discussion paper

Poaching, raids, and managerial compensation

This paper presents a model of employee poaching with asymmetric employer learning. Firms poach managers not only due to their track record but also for their personnel-specific information about workers. In equilibrium,...Read more...

Yi Chen, Fabiano Dal-Ri, Thomas Jungbauer and Daniela Scur

13 August 2025

Blog

Vox EU Talk (podcast):

Gender and the labour market

How much progress have we made in finding out the source of gender inequality at work? At the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford and CEPR gave the keynote lecture on 'Questions and...Read more...

Barbara Petrongolo

1 August 2025

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Well designed paternity leave makes Spain a model of success

Spain recently equalised paternity and maternity leave at 16 weeks - but did fathers take advantage of the new policy? The answer is a resounding yes. Libertad Gonzalez, Lidia Farre, Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valen...Read more...

Lidia Farre, Libertad Gonzalez, Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

23 July 2025

Blog

LSE Business Review:

People value workplace safety more than traditionally believed

Some workplaces are inherently more dangerous than others, but during the pandemic almost all workplaces became risky. Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig investigated whether workers during COVID chose to forgo earnings to ...Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

15 July 2025

CEP discussion paper

Who is my neighbour? Short-term renting and civic engagement in London

Urbanization has transformed cities into the economic hubs of high-income countries, yet concerns about declining social capital persist. This paper investigates the impact of changes in neighbourhood composition on soci...Read more...

Nicola Fontana

2 July 2025

CEP discussion paper

Paternity leave in Spain

Between 2017 and 2021, Spain progressively extended paternity leave from 2 to 16 weeks, equalizing it with maternity leave and introducing mandatory weeks. A 2018 reform also allowed fathers to split their leave. Using a...Read more...

Lidia Farre, Libertad Gonzalez, Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

2 July 2025

CentrePiece article

The lasting impact of 9/11 on Muslim integration in America

Understanding the long-term social impact of historical events provides insights into current global debates on immigration, integration and Islamophobia. In a study of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Shadi Farahza...Read more...

Shadi Farahzadi

20 June 2025

CentrePiece article

in brief... How gender quotas are challenging political inequality in South Korea

Boosting women’s representation in government means understanding what type of gender discrimination is being practised, say Jay Euijung Lee and Martina Zanella....Read more...

Jay Euijung Lee and Martina Zanella

20 June 2025

CentrePiece article

Public sector relocation: lessons from the BBC’s move to Salford

Moving public agencies out of London was a major plank of the levelling-up agenda. Max Nathan, Henry Overman, Capucine Riom and Maria Sanchez-Vidal show how the BBC’s move to Salford had a positive effect on the local ec...Read more...

Max Nathan, Henry G. Overman, Capucine Riom and Maria Sanchez-Vidal

20 June 2025

CEP discussion paper

Estimating labour market power: the long and short of it

This paper combines two empirical traditions in the study of employer monopsony power. One tradition estimates static firm labour supply elasticities, while the other focuses on labour market flows, estimating separation...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier and Alan Manning

10 June 2025

CEP discussion paper

Meaning at work

We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "D...Read more...

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales

14 May 2025

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Why the social care visa had to go

One of the changes to the UK work migration regime announced in this week's White Paper was that care workers could no longer be hired directly from abroad. To some this return to the pre-2021 system was an act of econom...Read more...

Alan Manning

14 May 2025

CEP discussion paper

Willingness to pay for workplace amenities

We develop a revealed preference approach to measure the value of workplace amenities by analyzing how variation in non-wage job attributes affects excess mass in the earnings distribution at budget discontinuities. The ...Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

6 May 2025

CEP discussion paper

Personnel is policy (implementation): Bureaucrats and the Korean export miracle

How much does the effect of industrial policy depend on the capacity of the bureaucrats implementing it? We exploit the rotation schedule of managers of South Korea's export promotion offices in 87 countries between 1965...Read more...

Philipp Barteska and Jay Euijung Lee

6 May 2025

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

Pay Transparency and Gender Equality

Since 2018, UK firms with at least 250 employees have been mandated to publicly disclose gender equality indicators. Exploiting variations in this mandate across firm size and time, we show that pay transparency closes 1...Read more...

Jack Blundell, Emma Duchini, Stefania Simion and Arthur Turrell

1 May 2025

Blog

The Conversation:

Why are women paid less than men? New research in South Africa shows the company you work for makes the biggest difference

Why do women earn less than men? The usual suspects - occupation, hours, experience - explain some of it. But a powerful, often overlooked reason is simply this: where women work. The companies that hire them play a huge...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier and Leila Gautham

30 April 2025

CEP discussion paper

Minimum wages and low wage workers: Compliance as non-employment margin

This paper examines the impact of a substantial minimum wage increase in Uruguay - a middle-income developing economy - on wages and employment. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences approach, we anal...Read more...

Nicolas Gonzalez-Pampillon and Javier Vazquez-Grenno

29 April 2025