CEP | People | Mirko Draca

Biography

Mirko Draca is a Professor of Economics at Warwick and a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance. He is also the Director of Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE). His main research area is applied microeconomics, with applications to labour markets, political economy, criminal behaviour and innovation and technology. Current projects include work on the 'returns to crime', the impact of targeted economic sanctions on firms, and further work on lobbying.

Publications

Journal article

How Polarised are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground-Up

We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political ... Read more...

Mirko Draca and Carlo Schwarz

21 February 2024

Journal article

Financing UK democracy: a stocktake of 20 years of political donations disclosure

Political donations in the UK have been subject to comprehensive disclosure since 2001. We study the data produced as part of this disclosure policy to evaluate the role of private and public political finance over time.... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Colin Green and Swarnodeep Homroy

05 October 2023

Journal article

On Target? Sanctions and the interests of elite policy makers in Iran

How successful are sanctions at targeting the economic interests of political elites in affected countries? We study the case of Iran, using information on the stock exchange-listed assets of two specific political entit... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Jason Garred, Leanne Stickland and Nele Warrinnier

29 July 2022

Blog

Sanctions and the targeting of 'elite' interests: the effectiveness of targeting in the case of Iran

The targeting of elite interests has been at the centre of recent sanctions policies, and will be a major strategic concern as the world responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mirko Draca, Jason Garred, and Nele Wa... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Jason Garred and Nele Warrinnier

04 March 2022

CEP reports

Are 'green' jobs good jobs?

The transition to net-zero will have far-reaching but unequal effects, as 'dirty' jobs disappear while new jobs aligned with or supportive of the net-zero objective - which we refer to as 'green' - are created. As govern... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Jiaqi Li, Sabrina Muller, Viet Nguyen-Tien, Capucine Riom and Anna Valero

28 October 2021

Journal article

A reply to Campbell and Mau

In Bloom et al. (2016, Bloom, Draca and Van Reenen (BDVR)), we have a set of nine results on the impact of Chinese trade. The first three showed that Chinese trade increased technical change in European firms measured by... Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Mirko Draca and John Van Reenen

10 January 2021

Journal article

The changing returns to crime: do criminals respond to prices?

To what extent does crime follow the pattern of potential gains to illegal activity? This article presents evidence on how criminals respond to this key incentive by reporting crime-price elasticities estimated from a co... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Theodore Koutmeridis and Stephen Machin

01 May 2019

Journal article

Trade induced technical change? The impact of Chinese imports on innovation, IT and productivity

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change - patenting, IT, and TFP - using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish th... Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Mirko Draca and John Van Reenen

01 January 2016

CEP discussion papers

The changing returns to crime: do criminals respond to prices?

In economic models of crime individuals respond to changes in the potential value of criminal opportunities. We analyse this issue by estimating crime-price elasticities from detailed data on criminal incidents in London... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Theodore Koutmeridis and Stephen Machin

01 June 2015

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

The UK's 'riddle of peacefulness': what explains falling crime?

There has been a substantial fall in rates of property theft and violent crime in the UK. The author surveys a series of CEP studies that shed light on this transformation - what BBC home editor Mark Easton has labelled ... Read more...

Mirko Draca

27 June 2013

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

The returns to lobbying

Research by Mirko Draca and colleagues on Washington's 'revolving door' lobbyists gives an indication of the value of political connections in the UK.... Read more...

Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen

16 February 2012

Journal article

Panic on the streets of London: police, crime, and the July 2005 terror attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime, looking at what happened to crime and police before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeploy... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt

01 August 2011

Journal article

Minimum wages and firm profitability

We study the impact of minimum wages on firm profitability, exploiting the changes induced by the introduction of a UK national minimum wage in 1999. We use pre-policy information on the distribution of wages to implemen... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and John Van Reenen

01 January 2011

CEP discussion papers

Trade induced technical change? The impact of Chinese imports on innovation, IT and productivity

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change - patenting, IT, R&D, TFP and management practices – using new panel data across twelve European countries between 1996-2007. We c... Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Mirko Draca and John Van Reenen

01 January 2011

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

In brief... 'Revolving door' lobbyists

Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen estimate the value of political connections in Washington... Read more...

Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen

09 November 2010

CEP discussion papers

Revolving Door Lobbyists

Washington's 'revolving door' - the movement from government service into the lobbying industry- is regarded as a major concern for policy-making. We study how ex-government staffers benefit from the personal connections... Read more...

Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen

01 August 2010

CEP discussion papers

Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime and the July 2005 Terror Attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of p... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt

01 February 2008

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

Panic on the streets of London

The terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005 resulted in a very large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs. New research by Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt looks at the impact of this increased ... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt

24 October 2006

CEP discussion papers

Productivity and ICT: A Review of the Evidence

We survey the micro and macro literature on the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on productivity. The “Solow Paradox” of the absence of an impact of ICT on productivity no longer holds, if it e... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

01 August 2006

CEP discussion papers

Minimum Wages and Firm Profitability

Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is hardly any evidence on their impact on firm performance. This is surprising: minim... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and John Van Reenen

01 February 2006

CEP discussion papers

The Employment Effects of the October 2003 Increase in the National Minimum Wage

There is a growing body of research that measures employment effects of the minimum wage by using longitudinal data on individuals to compare job loss of workers affected by a minimum wage increase with those who are not... Read more...

Richard Dickens and Mirko Draca

01 June 2005