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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...
Photo of factories. Credit: Javy Rhodes. Published under CC0 Public Domain. https://unsplash.com/ZRiUrY3bl60
Structural change within versus across firms: evidence from the United States

This work provides new support for the premise that firms play a key role in developing knowledge and using it to adapt to changing economic circumstances. Read more...

Latest Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper
The economic impacts of the UK's eat out to help out scheme

We evaluate the economic impacts of the UK's Eat Out to Help Out (EOTHO) scheme on the food service sector. EOTHO subsidised the cost of eating out, with a 50% discount Mondays to Wednesdays in August 2020. We exploit th...Read more...

Nicolas Gonzalez-Pampillon, Gonzalo Nunez-Chaim and Henry G. Overman

28 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Acquisitions, management and efficiency in Rwanda's coffee industry

Well-functioning markets allocate assets to owners that improve firms' management and performance. We study the effects of ownership changes on coffee mills in Rwanda - an industry in which managing relationships with fa...Read more...

Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

21 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Human wellbeing and machine learning

There is a vast literature on the determinants of subjective wellbeing. International organisations and statistical offices are now collecting such survey data at scale. However, standard regression models explain surpri...Read more...

Ekaterina Oparina, Caspar Kaiser, Niccolo Gentile, Alexandre Tkatchenko, Andrew E. Clark, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Conchita D'Ambrosio

20 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Market size, markups and international price dispersion in the cement industry

Prices for several intermediate inputs, including cement, are higher in developing economies - particularly in Africa. Combining data from the International Comparison Program with a global directory of cement plants we ...Read more...

Fabrizio Leone, Rocco Macchiavello and Tristan Reed

19 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Social push and the direction of innovation

Innovators are intrinsically-motivated individuals who use ideas to create new goods and services. This raises the possibility that their social backgrounds may affect the direction of their innovative activity. Consiste...Read more...

Elias Einio, Josh Feng and Xavier Jaravel

13 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Endogenous cross-region human mobility and pandemics

We study infectious diseases using a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Deceased model with endogenous cross-region human mobility. Individuals weigh the risk of infection against economic opportunities when moving across re...Read more...

Xiao Chen, Hanwei Huang, Jiandong Ju, Ruoyan Sun and Jialiang Zhang

13 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Nonparametric measurement of long-run growth in consumer welfare

How should we measure long-run changes in consumer welfare? This paper proposes a nonparametric approach that is valid under arbitrary preferences that depend on observable consumer characteristics, e.g. when expenditure...Read more...

Xavier Jaravel and Danial Lashkari

12 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Political adverse selection

We study how the politicization of policies designed to correct market failures can undermine their effectiveness. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was among the most politically divisive expansions o...Read more...

Leonardo Bursztyn, Jonathan Kolstad, Aakaash Rao, Pietro Tebaldi and Noam Yuchtman

12 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
Firm-level technological change and skill demand

We quantify the contribution of firm-level technological change to skill demand and aggregate inequality in the presence of imperfect competition in the labor market. We show that skill-biased technological change increa...Read more...

Attila Lindner, Balazs Murakozy, Balazs Reizer and Ragnhild Schreiner

1 July 2022

CEP discussion paper
The research university, invention and industry: evidence from German history

We examine the role of universities in knowledge production and industrial change using historical evidence. Political shocks led to a profound pro-science shift in German universities around 1800. To study the consequen...Read more...

Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralph R. Meisenzahl

30 June 2022

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

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