In the Spring 2018 edition of CentrePiece:

In this edition:

Is there a payoff to apprenticeships for young people?

As part of an effort to transform the UK?s post-16 educational landscape, the government is aiming for a massive increase in the number of apprenticeships. Research by Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventur... Read more...

Poor productivity: an Italian perspective

Productivity growth has been slow in Western countries since the global financial crisis, but in Italy it has been stagnating for 25 years. Fadi Hassan and Gianmarco Ottaviano investigate inefficiency and misallocation i... Read more...

Lost Einsteins: who becomes an inventor in America?

Who are America?s most successful inventors ? and what can we learn from their experiences in designing policies to stimulate innovation? To answer these questions, former CEP director John Van Reenen and his colleagues ... Read more...

How 'local' are local labour markets?

If we want to create jobs in disadvantaged local areas, the idea of `local? needs to be revisited. Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo explain the problem of thinking of geographical space as non-overlapping single labou... Read more...

Nursery attendance and children's outcomes

The UK government has expanded the popular `free entitlement? to part-time early education and care from a universal 15 hours per week to 30 hours per week for working parents. But research by Jo Blanden and co-authors r... Read more...

In brief... Empty homes, longer commutes

In areas of Britain where there are empty houses, planners typically allocate less land for development and make it more difficult to build or adapt houses. Research by Paul Cheshire, Christian Hilber and Hans Koster exp... Read more...

Brexit: the economics of international disintegration

Pro-Brexit rhetoric mixes up two distinct interpretations of what made people vote to Leave the European Union ? and they have very different policy implications. As Thomas Sampson explains, those voters wanting to recla... Read more...

Family firms: the problem of second-generation bosses

Although family firms are widely praised as the `backbone of the economy?, their productivity is often hampered by weak management. Research by Daniela Scur and Renata Lemos provides new evidence on the performance of `d... Read more...