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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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The environmental cost of the international job market for economists

Olivier Chanel, Alberto Prati and Morgan Raux use the switch to online interviews during Covid-19 to analyse the carbon cost of travel during annual economics job market meetings. Read more...
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Do well managed firms make better forecasts?

CEP researchers review a new UK management survey and find large variation in management practices that correlate with levels of productivity, profitability, size and accuracy of forecasting. Read more...

Latest Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper
Optimal minimum wages

We develop a quantitative spatial model with heterogeneous firms and a monopsonistic labour market to derive minimum wages that maximize employment or welfare. Quantifying the model for German micro regions, we find that...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel

20 January 2022

CEP discussion paper
Local retail prices, product varieties and neighborhood change

We study how local grocery prices within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy is based on an exogenous shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-sc...Read more...

Fernando Borraz, Felipe Carozzi, Nicolás González-Pampillón and Leandro Zipitria

20 January 2022

CEP discussion paper
Do well managed firms make better forecasts?

We link a new UK management survey covering 8,000 firms to panel data on productivity in manufacturing and services. There is a large variation in management practices, which are highly correlated with productivity, prof...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Takafumi Kawakubo, Charlotte Meng, Paul Mizen, Rebecca Riley, Tatsuro Senga and John Van Reenen

5 January 2022

CEP discussion paper
Men are from Mars, and women too: a Bayesian meta-analysis of overconfidence experiments

Gender differences in self-confidence could explain women's under representation in high-income occupations and glass-ceiling effects. We draw lessons from the economic literature via a survey of experts and a Bayesian h...Read more...

Oriana Bandiera, Nidhi Parekh, Barbara Petrongolo and Michelle Rao

17 December 2021

CEP discussion paper
The environmental cost of the international job market for economists

We provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the recruitment system in the economics profession, known as the "international job market for economists". Each year, most graduating PhDs seeking jobs in academia, ...Read more...

Olivier Chanel, Alberto Prati and Morgan Raux

15 December 2021

CEP discussion paper
Product market competition, creative destruction and innovation

We examine the economic analysis of the relationship between innovation and product market competition. First, we give a brief tour of the intellectual history of the area. Second, we examine how the Aghion-Howitt framew...Read more...

Rachel Griffith and John Van Reenen

30 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
Air pollution and innovation

Existing estimates of the economic costs of air pollution do not account for its effect on inventive output. Using two weather phenomena as instruments, we estimate this effect in a sample of 1,288 European regions. A de...Read more...

Felix Bracht and Dennis Verhoeven

26 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
Labor unions and the electoral consequences of trade liberalization

We show that the Brazilian trade liberalization in the early 1990s led to a permanent relative decline in the vote share of left-wing presidential candidates in the regions more affected by the tariff cuts. This happened...Read more...

Pedro Molina Ogeda, Emanuel Ornelas and Rodrigo R. Soares

17 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
From immediate acceptance to deferred acceptance: effects on school admissions and achievement in England

Countries and cities around the world increasingly rely on centralized systems to assign students to schools. Two algorithms, deferred acceptance (DA) and immediate acceptance (IA), are widespread. The latter is often cr...Read more...

Parag A. Pathak, Kevin Ren and Camille Terrier

15 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
Population growth, immigration and labour market dynamics

This paper examines the role of population flows on labour market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations in the United Kingdom. Population flows are large, and cyclical, driven first by the maturation of b...Read more...

Michael W. L. Elsby, Jennifer C. Smith and Jonathan Wadsworth

10 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
Efficient industrial policy for innovation: standing on the shoulders of hidden giants

Research and development is underprovided whenever it creates knowledge spillovers that drive a wedge between its total and private economic returns. Heterogeneity in the intensity of this market failure across technolog...Read more...

Charlotte Guillard, Ralf Martin, Pierre Mohnen, Catherine Thomas and Dennis Verhoeven

4 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
Have productivity and pay decoupled in the UK?

In the long-run at the macro level, the real pay of workers tends to follow labour productivity. In recent years, however, there have been concerns that this relationship has broken down and that pay has become "decouple...Read more...

Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

3 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
AI-tocracy

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the ...Read more...

Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman

2 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
Strategic confusopoly: evidence from the UK mobile market

Do firms strategically confuse their customers? Using a detailed dataset covering virtually all mobile phone tariffs and their handsets in the UK between January 2010 and September 2012, we examine the co-evolution of pr...Read more...

Christos Genakos, Tobias Kretschmer and Ambre Nicolle

1 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
"Better the devil you know": are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?

Most people want to be both happy and healthy. But which matters most when there is a trade-off between them? This paper addresses this question by asking 4,000 members of the public in the UK and the US to make various ...Read more...

Matthew D. Adler, Paul Dolan, Amanda Henwood and Georgios Kavetsos

1 November 2021

CEP discussion paper
Do carbon offsets offset carbon?

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies, and use it to provide systematic evidence on the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism - the world's largest carbon off...Read more...

Raphael Calel, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezleprêtre and Matthieu Glachant

29 October 2021

CEP discussion paper
Minimum wages and the China syndrome: causal evidence from US local labor markets

Exposure to Chinese import competition led to significant manufacturing job losses in the United States. Local labor markets, however, differ significantly in how they fared with respect to manufacturing employment. An i...Read more...

Luke Milsom and Isabelle Roland

28 October 2021

CEP discussion paper
Intangibles and industry concentration: supersize me

This paper presents new evidence on the growing scale of big businesses in the United States, Japan and 11 European countries. It documents a broad increase in industry concentration across the majority of countries and ...Read more...

Matej Bajgar, Chiara Criscuolo and Jonathan Timmis

28 October 2021

CEP discussion paper
Pandemic shock and economic divergence: political economy before and after the black death

We document how the Black Death activated politics and led to economic divergence within Europe. Before the pandemic, economic development was similar in Eastern and Western German cities despite greater political fragme...Read more...

Luis Bosshart and Jeremiah Dittmar

22 October 2021

CEP discussion paper
Business groups as knowledge-based hierarchies of firms

Hierarchical differentiation is a cornerstone of the organizing process. In this paper, we do three things. First, exploiting a newly assembled dataset, we provide the first worldwide overview of the patterns of hierarch...Read more...

Carlo Altomonte, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Armando Rungi and Tommaso Sonno

15 October 2021

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