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Comment, analysis, and debate by CEP researchers on today's economic and social policy issues.
Before Trump's inauguration there were questions over the potential consequences of his tariffs.
To celebrate Women's History Month, Swati Dhingra shares her experiences, from India to British academia and the Bank of England.
The accelerating shift to clean energy and advanced technologies is redrawing the map of global economic power. As nations and firms race to secure critical minerals, rare earths - small in trade value but high in strate...Read more...
Gavin Harper and Viet Nguyen-Tien
31 October 2025
What does a £180,000 job ad for a private tutor *for a baby* reveal about the global education arms race? It's tempting to put it down to the eccentric indulgence of a tiny global elite. But it in fact points to an expl...Read more...
Lee Elliot Major
29 October 2025
Many elements of the renters' rights bill are likely to improve the lives of renters without harming landlords. But some of the improvements for tenants will make being a landlord more difficult or even, for some, undesi...Read more...
Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta
24 October 2025
Can entire markets strategically confuse consumers to raise prices? This column tracks the prices of nearly all mobile phone tariffs and handsets in the UK from 2010 to 2012, and finds that quality-adjusted prices rise i...Read more...
Christos Genakos, Tobias Kretschmer and Ambre Nicolle
23 October 2025
For two decades, the UK economy has seen weak growth, driven by low business investment, inadequate market dynamism and persistent policy instability. These failures shape the daily reality of households whose living sta...Read more...
Aadya Bahl
22 October 2025
John Van Reenen writes about the profound influence of Nobel laureate Philippe Aghion's work not only on growth and industrial organisation, but also on fields as diverse as trade, labour, taxation, the environment, poli...Read more...
John Van Reenen
20 October 2025
Wars devastate infrastructure and institutions, but their most profound costs are often borne by human capital. Education systems are among the first casualties of conflict: schools are destroyed, and families are displa...Read more...
Lelys Dinarte-Diaz, James Gresham, Renata Lemos, Harry A. Patrinos and Rony Rodriguez-Ramirez
2 October 2025
Students of private and grammar schools are over-represented in elite universities. While some of that is explained by better grades, therse is also a degree of mismatch between how well students do in exams and the qual...Read more...
Jo Blanden, Oliver Cassagneau-Francis, Lindsey Macmillan and Gill Wyness
This blog is the third in our new series on the drivers of productivity. The drivers of productivity include skills, capital, innovation, enterprise and competition, and land. This blog focuses on innovation, and complem...Read more...
Anamaria Tibocha-Nino
30 September 2025
Schools are lauded for their ability to keep young people away from crime and on the right path. But what happens behind the school gates? Janine Boshoff and Matteo Sandi reveal a more complex story - one where schoolyar...Read more...
Janine Boshoff and Matteo Sandi
Mobile connectivity can have a positive economic impact on jobs and incomes. But how does it shape household wealth inequality? Zhiwu Wei, Neil Lee and Yohan Iddawela investigate. The Philippines serves as the ideal case...Read more...
Yohan Iddawela, Neil Lee and Zhiwu Wei
23 September 2025
The consensus says that it's a bad tax, yet politicians have been shying away from reforming council tax for decades. Paul Cheshire offers an alternative that could be fairer and act as the wealth tax that many are calli...Read more...
Paul Cheshire
16 September 2025
This blog is the second in our new series on the drivers of productivity. The drivers of productivity include skills, capital, innovation, enterprise and competition, and land. This blog focuses on capital, and complemen...Read more...
Reform UK's policy on irregular immigration of "detect, detain, deport" has been widely criticised on legal and moral grounds. But Alan Manning looks at the practical difficulties with enacting this policy and finds that...Read more...
Alan Manning
9 September 2025
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...
1 September 2025
For years, academic economists have argued that council tax and stamp duty are deeply flawed. But now the UK government is said to be considering a change to stamp duty so that it is only paid on houses selling for more ...Read more...
28 August 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
The gap in living standards between the UK and US has widened sharply in recent years. Aadya Bahl argues that reversing this trend means confronting the UK's deep-rooted productivity and investment challenges....Read more...
19 August 2025
The 16-year-olds who took their GCSEs this summer started secondary school in the middle of the pandemic. The results of these high-stakes exams will highlight the uneven toll that Covid-19 lockdowns took on learning, as...Read more...
18 August 2025
What is good management, and how is it transmitted across firms and plants? In a recent paper, we use survey and administrative data, coupled with a structural model of management, to explore these questions. We show tha...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen
13 August 2025
