Skip to main content
In this guest blog, Aadya Bahl talks about the analysis done for the CEP report Hive of talent: what would it take to raise skills and productivity in Greater Manchester? published last week. For more information on avai...Read more...
Aadya Bahl
5 May 2026
In theory, science aspires to be cosmopolitan. Where you are from and where you undertake your research are secondary to the quality of your ideas. However, as Andres-Rodriguez-Pose, Leiboyu Xiang, and Neil Lee show, the...Read more...
Neil Lee, Andres Rodriguez-Pose and Leiboyu Xiang
26 January 2026
This blog is the first in our new series on the drivers of productivity. The drivers of productivity include skills, investment, innovation, enterprise and competition, and land. This blog focuses on skills, and compleme...Read more...
Anamaria Tibocha-Nino
1 September 2025
August means airports, and now that air travel has rebounded from the lows during the Covid-19 pandemic to reach levels where globally there are more flights than ever, airports face bigger and bigger tests on their capa...Read more...
Will Brett-Harding
28 August 2025
To succeed, the industrial strategy needs to build strong local ecosystems in places where the eight priority sectors can thrive. The example of Greater Manchester shows why investment must be joined-up and focused on ma...Read more...
22 July 2025
Aadya Bahl and Henry Overman discuss the difficult but essential decisions the UK Government must make to target investment strategically so that we can close the country's productivity gap and create economic growth. In...Read more...
Aadya Bahl and Henry G. Overman
27 May 2025
Neil Lee gave evidence to the science, innovation and technology committee about the UK's innovation ecosystem and how it compares to other countries....Read more...
Neil Lee
6 May 2025
Moving public agencies out of London was a major plank of the levelling-up agenda. The effects on local economies seem smaller than hoped - and it's important to compare them with those of other tools of regional policy:...Read more...
Max Nathan, Henry G. Overman, Capucine Riom and Maria Sanchez-Vidal
19 December 2024
Centre for Cities chief executive Andrew Carter is joined by Professor Neil Lee, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics and author of Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the...Read more...
7 May 2024
Cities are warming faster than their rural surroundings. But the ecosystem support provided by urban forestry is often omitted from climate policies due to the difficulty in assigning to it a credible monetary sum. Lu Ha...Read more...
Lu Han, Stephan Heblich, Christopher Timmins and Yanos Zylberberg
25 April 2024
Felipe Carozzi and Andres Gago present evidence from Spain that can provide a partial explanation for a growing ideological gap between young men and women across the world....Read more...
Felipe Carozzi and Andres Gago
11 April 2024
To what extent did the wealth derived from slavery contribute to Europe's economic growth? Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth find that slaveholding areas of Britain were less agricultural, closer to ...Read more...
Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth
26 October 2023
Spatial inequality has become a key policy concern across much of the advanced world, prompting a spate of government action on the issue in recent years. This column presents evidence showing that, contrary to the popul...Read more...
Luis Bauluz, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Filip Novokmet and Moritz Schularick
10 October 2023
Few would disagree that the UK has a significant productivity problem, or fail to recognise that the poor performance of the nation's largest cities outside the capital contribute to that situation. As the Economy 2030 I...Read more...
Paul Brandily, Mike Brewer, Nye Cominetti, Matt Coombes, Adam Corlett, Lindsay Judge, Felicia Odamtten, Henry G. Overman, Cara Pacitti, Gui Rodrigues, Krishan Shah, Paul Swinney and Lalitha Try
19 September 2023
After the success of the Commonwealth Games in 2022, Birmingham is now in the news for the wrong reasons. Financial difficulties facing the City Council culminated in a formal declaration on 5 September 2023 that Britain...Read more...
14 September 2023
Henry Overman explains what spatial disparities are, why we need to consider them when thinking about local economic growth policies and whether we should try to reduce them....Read more...
Henry G. Overman
22 August 2023
Henry Overman speaks to Chief Executive Andrew Carter about how to measure the scale of the underperformance of cities in the UK and search for evidence that could point us towards the right solutions, in this podcast ep...Read more...
Andrew Carter and Henry G. Overman
22 June 2023
Recorded at CEPR's June Paris Symposium, Tony Venables presents his research on those regional disparities in the UK which originated in the 1970s through negative trade and technology shocks and whose long run consequen...Read more...
Anthony J. Venables
5 October 2022
Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Inequality isn't just between individuals, but between regions too. Henry Overman explains to Tim Phillips why these disparities exist, why they are so persistent, and whether ...Read more...
8 July 2022
An economic strategy that helps the UK respond to change and tackle stagnant living standards and productivity will need to address the stubborn spatial disparities in economic performance across the UK. Addressing these...Read more...
Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Helene Donnat, Henry G. Overman and Krishan Shah
30 June 2022
The economic shocks experienced by the UK economy in the 1970s brought major changes in the spatial distribution of employment rates in the UK. This paper traces the long-run implications of these changes, suggesting tha...Read more...
Patricia Rice and Anthony J. Venables
5 April 2021
This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 347 estimates of density elasticities of a broad range of outcomes ranging from wages, innovation, rents, various amenities, t...Read more...
Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Elisabetta Pietrostefani
1 May 2019
This paper estimates the impact of new road infrastructure on employment and labour productivity using firm level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured through changes in accessibi...Read more...
Stephen Gibbons, Teemu Lyytikainen, Henry G. Overman and Rosa Sanchis-Guarner
1 March 2019
We study the role of book content in economic, religious, and institutional development after the introduction of printing, and the role of competition in determining the amount and content of local printing. We focus on...Read more...
Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold
31 January 2019
This report was commissioned by the National Infrastructure Commission as part of the evidence base for the National Infrastructure Assessment. The views expressed and recommendations set out in this report are the autho...Read more...
Stephen Gibbons and Daniel J. Graham
9 August 2018
