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Discussion papers

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

Are friends electric? Valuing the social costs of power lines using house prices

New evidence on the negative impact of power lines on house prices suggests they're more extensive than previously thought.
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Public disclosure and tax compliance: evidence from Uganda

CEP researchers examine whether shaming non-taxpayers, and praising those who pay up, can boost tax compliance in Kampala, Uganda. Read more...

Latest Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper
Induced innovation and international environmental agreements: Evidence from the ozone regime

This paper revisits one of the rare success stories in global environmental cooperation: the Montreal Protocol and the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances. I show that the protocol increased science and innovation on...Read more...

Eugenie Dugoua

22 September 2023

CEP discussion paper
Free to improve? The impact of free school attendance in England

We investigate the impact of attending a free school in England - that is, a new start-up school that enjoys considerable autonomy while remaining in the state sector. We analyse the effects of two secondary free schools...Read more...

Marco Bertoni, Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren and Olmo Silva

21 September 2023

CEP discussion paper
Do larger firms exert more market power? Markups and markdowns along the size distribution

Several models posit a positive cross-sectional correlation between markups and firm size, which characterizes misallocation, factor shares, and gains from trade. Accounting for labor market power in markup estimation, w...Read more...

Matthias Mertens and Bernardo Mottironi

21 September 2023

CEP discussion paper
Gender gaps from labor market shocks

Job loss leads to persistent adverse labor market outcomes, but assessments of gender differences in labor market recovery are lacking. We utilize plant closures in Denmark to estimate gender gaps in labor market outcome...Read more...

Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen

18 September 2023

CEP discussion paper
Vacancy duration and wages

We estimate the elasticity of vacancy duration with respect to posted wages, using data from the near-universe of online job adverts in the United Kingdom. Our research design identifies duration elasticities by leveragi...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier, Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo

18 August 2023

CEP discussion paper
Are friends electric? Valuing the social costs of power lines using house prices

Overhead electrical power lines and pylons have long raised concerns regarding the effects of electromagnetic fields on health, noise pollution and the visual impact on rural landscapes. These issues are once again salie...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons and Cheng Keat Tang

16 August 2023

CEP discussion paper
Spatial wage inequality in North America and Western Europe: changes between and within local labour markets 1975-2019

The rise of economic inequalities in advanced economies has been often linked with the growth of spatial inequalities within countries, yet there is limited comparative research that studies the relationship between nati...Read more...

Luis Bauluz, Sebastien Breau, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Clement Malgouyres, Filip Novokmet, Moritz Schularick and Gregory Verdugo

16 August 2023

CEP discussion paper
Scars of war: the legacy of WW1 deaths on civic capital and combat motivation

What drives soldiers to risk their life in combat? We show that the legacy of war creates lasting conditions that encourage younger generations to take greater risks when fighting for their country. Using individual-leve...Read more...

Felipe Carozzi, Edward W. Pinchbeck and Luca Repetto

1 August 2023

CEP discussion paper
Is having an expert "friend" enough? An analysis of consumer switching behavior in mobile telephony

We present novel evidence from a large panel of UK consumers who receive personalized reminders from a specialist price-comparison website about the precise amount they could save by switching to their best-suited altern...Read more...

Christos Genakos, Costas Roumanias and Tommaso Valletti

25 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Are the upwardly mobile more left-wing?

It is well-known that the wealthier are more likely to have Right-leaning political preferences. We here in addition consider the role of the individual's starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark and Maria Cotofan

21 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Public disclosure and tax compliance: evidence from Uganda

Public disclosure policies have potential to raise tax compliance where alternative enforcement capacity is limited. We study the effects of reporting delinquents and recognizing compliers and provide evidence on the soc...Read more...

Priya Manwaring and Tanner Regan

21 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Does Chinese research hinge on US co-authors? Evidence from the China initiative

Launched in November 2018 by the Trump administration, the China Initiative was meant to "protect US intellectual property and technologies against Chinese Economic Espionage". In practice, it made administrative procedu...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Celine Antonin, Luc Paluskiewicz, David Stromberg, Raphael Wargon and Karolina Westin

17 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Remote work across jobs, companies and space

The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure and characterize this shift, we examine more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a st...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Stephen Hansen, Peter Lambert, Raffaella Sadun and Bledi Taska

14 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Access to guns in the heat of the moment: more restrictive gun laws mitigate the effect of temperature on violence

Gun violence is a major problem in the United States, and extensive prior work has shown that higher temperatures increase violent behavior. We consider whether restricting the concealed carry of firearms mitigates or e...Read more...

Jonathan Colmer and Jennifer L. Doleac

13 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Knowledge spillovers from clean innovation. A tradeoff between growth and climate?

Innovation policy faces a tradeoff between growth and climate objectives when the knowledge spillover externality from clean innovation is low compared to other sectors. To make such a comparison, we use patent data to e...Read more...

Ralf Martin and Dennis Verhoeven

12 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Back to Edgeworth? Estimating the value of time using hedonic experiences

Following early economist Francis Y. Edgeworth's proposal to measure people's hedonic experiences as they go about their daily lives, we use a smartphone app that over eight years randomly asked a panel of 30, 936 UK res...Read more...

Christian Krekel and George MacKerron

12 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
Dissecting the sinews of power: international trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal-military state, 1689-1823

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of dome...Read more...

Ernesto Dal Bo, Karolina Hutkova, Lukas Leucht and Noam Yuchtman

5 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
The measure of monopsony: the labour supply elasticity to the firm and its constituents

The estimation of labour supply elasticities is central to the measurement of monopsony power in the labor market. In this paper I provide new, firm-level estimates of the labour supply elasticity that distinguish betwee...Read more...

Nikhil Datta

3 July 2023

CEP discussion paper
The impact of Covid-19 on productivity

We analyse the impact of Covid-19 on productivity using data from an innovative monthly firm survey panel that asks for quantitative impacts of Covid on inputs and outputs. We find total factor productivity (TFP) fell by...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Pawel Smietanka and Gregory Thwaites

26 June 2023

CEP discussion paper
The dynamics of the 'Great Gatsby Curve' and a look at the curve during the Great Gatsby era

We use linked historical US censuses to study the empirical relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. We first confirm that the 'Great Gatsby Curve' already existed in the early 20th century. We the...Read more...

Diego Battiston, Stephan Maurer, Andrei Potlogea and José V. Rodríguez Mora

20 June 2023

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