Publications

CEP discussion paper

The impact of regulation on innovation

Does regulation affect the pace and nature of innovation and if so, by how much? We build a tractable and quantifiable endogenous growth model with size-contingent regulations. We apply this to population administrative ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

New incentives for businesses to train their employees are needed for economic recovery from COVID-19

The need to retrain or upskill the workforce has become ever more urgent due to sharp changes in skills demand induced by the pandemic, write Jiaqi Li, Guglielmo Ventura and Anna Valero....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why have house prices risen so much more than rents in superstar cities?

In most countries – particularly in supply constrained superstar cities – house prices have risen much more strongly than rents over the last two decades. We provide an explanation that does not rely on falling interest ...Read more...

Blog

Bloomberg Stephanomics Podcasts:

The economic cost of Covid-19's mental health crisis

Richard Layard talks about why the coronavirus should make us rethink how we treat mental illness, how "building back better" should mean services rather than roads and railways, and why money really doesn't make us happ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of non-tariff barriers on trade and welfare

Deep trade agreements are widespread and have taken the world beyond tariff liberalization in goods trade. As the importance of global supply chains and the services sector increased across the world, shallow tariff redu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: The UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000-2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Markups, intangible capital and heterogeneous financial frictions

This paper studies the interaction between financial frictions, intangible investment decisions, and markups at the firm level. In our model, heterogeneous credit constraints distort firms' decisions to invest in cost-re...Read more...

Blog

Institute for the Future of Work:

The impact of Covid-19 on technology adoption

Anna Valero and Professor John Van Reenen examine the evidence on technology adoption through the pandemic and what it means for the UK's future of work and productivity crisis. New evidence offers a basis for guarded te...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade protection along supply chains

During the last decades, the United States has applied increasingly high trade protection against China. We combine detailed information on US antidumping (AD) duties— the most widely used trade barrier — with US input-o...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Closing the gap between vocational and general education: University Technical Colleges in England

England introduced University Technical Colleges - hybrid education institutions which combine general and vocational education - in 2010. This column presents the results from the first evaluation of the causal effect o...Read more...

Blog

LSE Blogs:

What happened when parents lost their jobs during lockdown?

Many parents had to cope with losing their jobs or part of their income at the same time as they were forced to home school. How did this affect their children's learning and their mental health? Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isp...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Labour market shocks during the Covid-19 pandemic: inequalities and child outcomes

We study the effect of negative labour market shocks borne by parents during the Covid-19 crisis on resource and time investments in children and the channels through which negative labour market shocks experienced by pa...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Innovation for a strong and sustainable recovery

In the recovery from Covid-19, innovation and diffusion will be key to addressing several structural challenges facing the UK economy. These include improving the UK’s longstanding poor productivity performance, addressi...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19 blog:

Why bike thefts, anti-social behaviour and drug offences have gone up during the pandemic

How has crime evolved in England and Wales during the pandemic? Tom Kirchmaier and Carmen Villa-Llera (Centre for Economic Performance, LSE) look at the effects of lockdown and job loss on the kinds of crimes being commi...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and changing crime trends in England and Wales

We document changing crime trends in England and Wales in the context of the current global pandemic. During the first lockdown that span from mid-March to mid-May 2020 there was a decrease in all crime categories except...Read more...

Blog

FE Week:

Why urgent support is needed to address UK skills deficit

New incentives are needed for businesses to train their employees for a post-Covid world, writes Guglielmo Ventura....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the externalities of renewable energy plants using wellbeing data: The case of biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, o...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Trends in job-related training and policies for building future skills into the recovery

The trends outlined in this paper and the broader evidence suggest that new or enhanced policies to increase the quantity and quality of job-related training are required, particularly for younger workers or those with l...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The UK's great demand and supply recession

We revisit UK’s poor productivity performance since the Great Recession by means of both a suitable theoretical framework and firm-level prices and quantities data for detailed products allowing us to both measure demand...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Lockdown shows us it is not work that attracts us to big cities - but the social life

Covid-19's effect on the social lives of city dwellers - being able to meet at the pub, restaurants or theatre - may be more relevant for the future of cities than its impact on work, write Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are bigger banks better? Firm-level evidence from Germany

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in post-war Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All aboard: the effects of port development

This paper examines the effects of port development on the economy. By using scarce local land intensively, ports put pressure on local land prices and crowd out other forms of economic activity. We use the introduction ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Brexit:

COVID-19 has disrupted businesses' ability to prepare for Brexit, but the lack of clarity on the UK-EU relationship is worse

Almost half of businesses report that COVID-19 has negatively affected their ability to prepare for Brexit. More than half listed uncertainty on the future arrangements between the UK and EU as a limitation on their abil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The grandkids aren't alright: the intergenerational effects of prenatal pollution exposure

Evidence shows that environmental quality shapes human capital at birth with long-run effects on health and welfare. Do these effects, in turn, affect the economic opportunities of future generations? Using newly linked ...Read more...