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Discussion papers

Findings from CEP's academic research are first published in our open-access discussion paper series.

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Unravelling deep integration: UK trade in the wake of Brexit

CEP researchers study the impact of Brexit on UK trade, revealing puzzling differences in the effects on imports and exports. Read more...
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Firms and inequality

Analysing the growing dominance of big companies, CEP researchers suggest ways to deal with the growth of superstar firms and strengthening worker bargaining power. Read more...

Latest Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper
Accidents will happen: (de)regulation of health and safety legislation, workplace accidents and self employment

In 2015, the UK government exempted "low-risk" self-employed workers from legislation on workplace safety. This reversed a move two decades earlier that incorporated the self-employed more fully into the same regulatory ...Read more...

Donna Brown and Jonathan Wadsworth

22 June 2022

CEP discussion paper
Foreign ownership and robot adoption

This paper shows that multinational enterprises (MNEs) spur the adoption of industrial robots. First, I document a positive and robust correlation between multinational production and robot adoption using a new cross-cou...Read more...

Fabrizio Leone

8 June 2022

CEP discussion paper
What makes a satisfying life? Prediction and interpretation with machine-learning algorithms

Machine Learning (ML) methods are increasingly being used across a variety of fields and have led to the discovery of intricate relationships between variables. We here apply ML methods to predict and interpret life sati...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio, Niccolo Gentile and Alexandre Tkatchenko

7 June 2022

CEP discussion paper
Structural change within versus across firms: evidence from the United States

We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' "auxiliary" establishments, we develop a novel ...Read more...

Xiang Ding, Teresa C. Fort, Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott

1 June 2022

CEP discussion paper
Social policy gone bad educationally: unintended peer effects from transferred students

Policy makers frequently use education as a welfare policy instrument. We examine one such case, where students from large and financially constrained families, were given the opportunity to be transferred to university ...Read more...

Christos Genakos and Eleni Kyrkopoulou

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
A new dataset to study a century of innovation in Europe and in the US

Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper,...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
Education inequality

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic...Read more...

Jo Blanden, Matthias Doepke and Jan Stuhler

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
Ask a local: improving the public pricing of land titles in urban Tanzania

Information on willingness-to-pay is key for public pricing and allocation of services but not easily collected. Studying land titles in Dar-es-Salaam, we ask whether local leaders know and will reveal plot owners' willi...Read more...

Martina Manara and Tanner Regan

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
Unravelling deep integration: UK trade in the wake of Brexit

This paper studies the impact of Brexit on the UK's trade with the EU relative to its trade with the rest of the world. We find no evidence that uncertainty and anticipation effects led to a significant decline in relati...Read more...

Rebecca Freeman, Kalina Manova, Thomas Prayer and Thomas Sampson

26 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
Pay, productivity and management

Using confidential Census matched employer-employee earnings data we find that employees at more productive firms, and firms with more structured management practices, have substantially higher pay, both on average and a...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Scott W. Ohlmacher, Cristina J. Tello-Trillo and Melanie Wallskog

7 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
The anatomy of a hospital system merger: the patient did not respond well to treatment

Despite the continuing US hospital merger wave, it remains unclear how mergers change, or fail to change, hospital behavior and performance. We open the "black box" of hospital practices through a mega-merger between two...Read more...

Martin Gaynor, Adam Sacarny, Raffaella Sadun, Chad Syverson and Shruthi Venkatesh

7 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
How does working from home during Covid-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on ...Read more...

Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer and Thomaz Teodorovicz

6 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
Managing export complexity: the role of service outsourcing

Exporting involves sunk and fixed costs in the form of service inputs, and whether such services are 'made' in-house or 'bought' from external agencies is a key organizational margin: it is not a core-competence of manuf...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri and Frank Pisch

6 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
The world uncertainty index

We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word "uncertainty" in the quarterly Economist Intelligence U...Read more...

Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri

5 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to access current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer and Thomaz Teodorovicz

5 April 2022

CEP discussion paper
The impact of mental health support for the chronically ill on hospital utilisation: evidence from the UK

Individuals with common mental disorders (CMDs) such as depression and anxiety frequently have co-occurring long-term physical health conditions (LTCs) and this co-occurrence is associated with higher hospital utilisatio...Read more...

Jonathan Gruber, Grace Lordan, Stephen Pilling, Carol Propper and Rob Saunders

25 March 2022

CEP discussion paper
Tuition fees and educational attainment

Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which were subsequently abolished until 2015. We exploit the unusual lack of grandfathering in these poli...Read more...

Jan Bietenbeck, Andreas Leibing, Jan Marcus and Felix Weinhardt

16 March 2022

CEP discussion paper
Firms and Inequality

In the last few decades, dramatic changes have been documented in the US business landscape. These include rising productivity and pay dispersion between firms, higher aggregate markups (of price over variable costs), gr...Read more...

Jan De Loecker, Tim Obermeier and John Van Reenen

9 March 2022

CEP discussion paper
Managerial and financial barriers during the green transition

We use data on 10,852 firms across 22 emerging markets to analyse how credit constraints and deficient firm management inhibit corporate investment in green technologies. For identification, we exploit quasi-exogenous va...Read more...

Ralph De Haas, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls and Helena Schweiger

7 March 2022

CEP discussion paper
Is online retail killing coffee shops? Estimating the winners and losers of online retail using customer transaction microdata

Is online retail a complement or substitute to local offline economies? This paper provides the first evidence that consumers use time saved from online retail to increase their trips for time-intensive services like cof...Read more...

Lindsay E. Relihan

3 March 2022

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