Skip to main content

Discussion papers

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

Latest Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper
The role of information frictions in study habit choice and academic performance

We study whether information frictions about the relative effectiveness of study methods distort how college students allocate multidimensional learning efforts and, in turn, affect their academic performance. Our baseli...Read more...

Agustina Affonso, Esteban M. Aucejo, Stephanie El Khoury and Tomas Larroucau

28 September 2026

CEP discussion paper
Revisiting test score forecasts and teacher value-added

We develop a framework for comparing forecasts in teacher value-added models. We apply it to interpret the teacher-switching test of Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014), showing that the teacher-switching coefficient ca...Read more...

Tom Ahn, Esteban M. Aucejo and Jonathan James

28 September 2026

CEP discussion paper
Productivity in teams: double crewing for police

Whether working in a team or alone results in higher productivity has been extensively studied in many settings, often being a controversial issue. This is none more so than for the police. Whether single or double crewi...Read more...

Tom Kirchmaier, Stephen Machin, Matteo Sandi and Robert Witt

28 September 2026

CEP discussion paper
Explaining the predictive performance of police in cases of domestic abuse

Police in England and Wales are asked to predict the likelihood of serious recidivism in domestic abuse cases, with little support beyond a flawed questionnaire. To analyze their decisions, we first develop methods to de...Read more...

Jeffrey Grogger, Andrew Jordan and Tom Kirchmaier

26 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Universities, new tasks, and the rise of services

Structural transformation from manufacturing to services varies sharply across US regions. We document that regions with universities, especially highly ranked research institutions, experience faster growth in high-skil...Read more...

Chang Liu and Kohei Takeda

20 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Geopolitics and export miracles: firm-level evidence from US war procurement in Korea

How did geopolitics shape East Asia's economic development? We find that US military procurement during the Vietnam War - a shock which peaked at nearly 3% of South Korean GDP, rivaling the Marshall Plan - catalyzed Kore...Read more...

Philipp Barteska, Oliver Kim, Nathan Lane and Seung Joo Lee

20 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Female-targeted hiring subsidies, firm learning, and women?s employment

Women often struggle to re-enter employment after career breaks, possibly because employers are uncertain about their productivity. We study whether hiring subsidies help firms overcome this uncertainty and hire from thi...Read more...

Mimosa Distefano, Lorenzo Incoronato and Anna Raute

12 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Defense promotion and industrial development

Major economies are rearming, and rearmament is itself industrial policy. I ask whether defense promotion - especially innovation policy - can drive industrial development beyond the defense sector. I synthesize evidence...Read more...

Nathan Lane

12 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Is data privacy a losing game? Evidence from Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy

We study the impact of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which requires apps to obtain explicit user permission before cross-app tracking, on the mobile gaming industry. Using SensorTower US data on the top...Read more...

Nestor Duch-Brown, Christos Genakos and Blair Yuan Lyu

12 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Intergenerational income persistence in the Millennial generation

This paper provides new evidence on intergenerational income persistence for a recent UK cohort. Using Next Steps, a longitudinal study of people born in England in 1989-90 linked to administrative education records, we ...Read more...

Paul Gregg, Yuyan Jiang, Lindsey Macmillan, Nikki Shure and Gill Wyness

12 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Brief yet effective: group counseling and college access for disadvantaged students

Large socioeconomic gaps in higher-education access and completion persist even among similarly talented students with access to generous funding, pointing to an important role for information frictions and unequal suppo...Read more...

Andres Barrios Fernandez, Josefina Eluchans Errazuriz and Fernanda Ramirez-Espinoza

12 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Teachers' leniency: experimental evidence

Two teachers grading the same student can reach very different conclusions? yet little is known about which teacher characteristics drive such disagreement. We investigate this question through a large-scale online exper...Read more...

Etienne Dagorn, Isaac Parkes and Alberto Prati

12 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Dynamic effects of trade

The existence of aggregate welfare gains from trade is one of the classic insights from international economics. However, these conventional welfare gains are static, in the sense that they take existing factor supplies ...Read more...

Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding

3 August 2026

CEP discussion paper
Employer market power: models and methods

It is now widely recognized that employers hold some wage-setting power over workers, and several recent reviews cover the resulting surge of research on monopsony. We take a high-level view, introducing the idea of the ...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier and Alan Manning

30 July 2026

CEP discussion paper
The equilibrium impact of credit frictions: evidence from default risk using firm-level data

This paper examines the impact of credit frictions arising from firm-level default risk on aggregate economic performance. We build a micro-to-macro model with heterogeneous firms and sector-specific production functions...Read more...

Timothy Besley, Peter John Lambert, Isabelle Michalski-Roland and John Van Reenen

29 July 2026

CEP discussion paper
Ports, technology and inter-city trade: the economics and geopolitics of evolving maritime transport networks

Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and shipping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granular ...Read more...

Reka Juhasz, David Krisztian Nagy, Claudia Steinwender and Woan Foong Wong

8 July 2026

CEP discussion paper
Protectionism and platform revenues

The Arab Spring made evident the dangers of democratization of information for incumbent governments, prompting regulatory changes that helped digital platforms gain power. We document a set of political favors (tariff s...Read more...

Massimo Morelli, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Tommaso Sonno

8 July 2026

CEP discussion paper
Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China's world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...Read more...

Stefano Carattini, Hanwei Huang, Tejendra P. Singh and Frank Pisch

8 July 2026

CEP discussion paper
Input uncertainty and firm performance: evidence from critical minerals

We study the effect of perceived input uncertainty about critical minerals on firm performance, separating second-moment risk from first-moment shocks and general firm-level uncertainty. Using earnings call transcripts m...Read more...

Viet Nguyen-Tien

2 July 2026

CEP discussion paper
International trade in an uncertain world

We develop a tractable quantitative model of international trade in which agents make bilateral investments in resilience under general equilibrium uncertainty. Under both complete and incomplete financial markets, we sh...Read more...

Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu, Stephen J. Redding and David Xu

30 June 2026

Latest 20 publications shown.     View all