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Do minorities benefit from social networks? In this paper, we study this question using the historical example of China's first modern bureaucratic organization, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Drawing on newly dig...Read more...
Yan Hu and Stephan Maurer
3 December 2025
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
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
How does technological progress affect workers' health? Melanie Arntz, Sebastian Findeisen, Stephan Maurer and Oliver Schlenker explore the effects of digitalisation and find evidence of worsening health among manual wor...Read more...
Melanie Arntz, Sebastian Findeisen, Stephan Maurer and Oliver Schlenker
18 October 2024
Real wage growth has stagnated. Policies which boost productivity or halt and reverse the trend to more employer power in wage bargaining are important in getting the UK out of the stagnation trap....Read more...
Stephen Machin
2 July 2024
The recent aggregate performance of the UK labour market looks good. But aggregate performance often obscures important changes around averages. Inequality along several dimensions remains a persistent feature of the UK ...Read more...
Jonathan Wadsworth
24 June 2024
Some of the effects of workplace digitalisation are well studied, such as changes in workers' wages and increased economic inequality. But how does technological progress affect workers' health? Melanie Arntz, Sebastian ...Read more...
26 April 2024
This month marks 25 years since a national minimum wage was introduced in the UK. Once a controversial policy, due to fears that it would lead to fewer jobs, it has instead proven to be highly successful. The minimum wag...Read more...
1 April 2024
Weak real wage growth, low wage work and higher wage inequality than the past are features of contemporary labour markets the world over. Longstanding wage controversies in economics are of relevance to them. This paper ...Read more...
1 March 2024
Spatial inequality in economic outcomes is increasingly seen as a problem for national economies. This paper considers spatial inequality in the UK labour market, its causes, and potential policy solutions. Relative to o...Read more...
Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham and Neil Lee
Tackling inequality between regions within a country has become a political priority across much of the advanced world. Luis Bauluz, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Filip...Read more...
Luis Bauluz, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Filip Novokmet and Moritz Schularick
20 February 2024
Pawel Bukowski discusses and debunks some of the common misconceptions regarding inequality in Poland....Read more...
Pawel Bukowski
24 January 2024
A series of industrial accidents that killed workers in the supply chains of multinational corporations triggered backlash by Western consumers. In response, many global companies committed to treat workers in poor count...Read more...
Jose P Vasquez
16 July 2023
Leveraging the geographic dimension of a large administrative panel on employer-employee contracts, we study the impact of robot adoption on wage inequality through changes in worker-firm assortativity. Using recently de...Read more...
Ester Faia, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Saverio Spinella
10 February 2023
South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This income inequality is mostly due to high unemployment and large differences in wages. In South Africa today, economists and policy-makers typically foc...Read more...
Ihsaan Bassier
19 January 2023
Two years after the Covid-19 crisis began, incomes of the UK’s self-employed remain well below their pre-pandemic levels. Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura explain why the solo self-employed, who represent about 85% of ...Read more...
Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura
20 October 2022
The world of work is changing. There have been huge shifts in the kinds of work we do and the types of organisations we work for. What has been happening to inequalities in the UK's labour market? What have been the imp...Read more...
Giulia Giupponi
3 August 2022
The cost of living crisis and the return of strikes over pay and conditions have brought the issue of worker power to the fore in 2022. Although some have pointed to a tight labour market as enabling workers to demand hi...Read more...
Ufuk Altunbuken, Pawel Bukowski, Stephen Machin and Hannah Slaughter
7 July 2022
Minimum wage increases have driven down the incidence of low hourly pay, but there has been much less progress elsewhere for low earners. Low pay is widespread among the self-employed, who do not benefit from the minimum...Read more...
Nye Cominetti, Rui Costa, Nikhil Datta and Felicia Odamtten
22 June 2022
Most working-age adults depend on earnings from jobs as their main source of income. Understanding the labour market has always been a central part of research at CEP and its predecessor the Centre for Labour Economics....Read more...
Alan Manning
29 March 2022
In this commentary, we propose a monopsony model of the labour market in which market power stems from idiosyncratic worker preferences over non-wage attributes of jobs. In this set-up, the relationship between wages and...Read more...
Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo
15 March 2022
Wage and earnings inequality has been on the rise in the UK since the late 1970s / early 1980s, and with faster increases than comparator countries it is now one of the countries with the highest levels of wage and earni...Read more...
Giulia Giupponi and Stephen Machin
A ban on non-compete agreements in Brazilian football led to an increased lifetime income for players. But as research by Bernardo Guimaraes, João Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek reveals, it was older players who gaine...Read more...
Bernardo Guimaraes, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek
22 February 2022
The economic impact of Covid has hit young people, and especially poorer young people, harder than others. Andrew Eyles assesses the extent of the shock and what it means for social mobility, which was already in decline...Read more...
Andrew Eyles
10 January 2022
In the third and final anniversary lecture marking 30 years since CEP began, director Stephen Machin focused on social mobility - the extent to which young people's opportunities in life can transcend their family backgr...Read more...
15 October 2021
