Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pandemics, global supply chains and local labor demand: evidence from 100 million posted jobs in China

This paper studies how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected labor demand, using over 100 million posted jobs on one of the largest online platforms in China. Our data reveal that the number of newly posted jobs within the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changing patterns of domestic abuse during Covid-19 lockdown

The effects of preventing a COVID-19 health crisis have had unintended consequences on domestic abuse (DA) victimization. We contribute to the literature on domestic abuse in lockdown by providing insight on how changing...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does pricing carbon mitigate climate change? Firm-level evidence from the European Union emissions trading scheme

In theory, market-based regulatory instruments correct market failures at least cost. However, evidence on their efficacy remains scarce. We evaluate the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) – the world’s fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

School indiscipline and crime

This paper studies the impact of compulsory schooling on violent behaviour and victimization in school using individual-level administrative data matching education and criminal records from Queensland (Australia). Explo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Place-based policies and spatial disparities across European cities

Spatial disparities in income levels and worklessness in the European Union are profound, persistent and may be widening. We describe disparities across metropolitan regions and discuss theories and empirical evidence th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Prime locations

We harness big data to detect prime locations - large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services - in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The social determinants of choice quality: evidence from health insurance in the Netherlands

Market provision of impure public goods such as insurance, retirement savings and education is common and growing as policy makers seek to offer more choice and gain efficiencies. This approach induces an important trade...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Work, care and gender during the Covid-19 crisis

We explore impacts of the pandemic crisis and associated restrictions to economic activity on paid and unpaid work for men and women in the UK. Using data from the Covid-19 supplement of Understanding Society, we find ev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Selection into entrepreneurship and self-employment

We study the effects of ability and liquidity constraints on entrepreneurship. We develop a three sector Roy model that differentiates between entrepreneurs and other self-employed to address puzzling gaps that have emer...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender differences in tertiary education: what explains STEM participation?

The share of women achieving tertiary education has increased rapidly over time and now exceeds that of men in most OECD countries. However, women are severely under-represented in maths-intensive science fields, which a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Partial lockdown and the spread of Covid-19: lessons from the Italian case

This paper investigates the effect of exemption of essential sectors from the lockdown enacted in Italy in Spring 2020 on COVID-19 infections and mortality. We exploit the distribution of the density of essential workers...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The crisis and job guarantees in urban India

This paper uses a new field survey of low-wage areas of urban India to show that employment and earnings were decimated by the lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. It examines workers’ desire for a job guarantee ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and geography

This paper reviews recent research on geography and trade. One of the key empirical findings over the last decade has been the role of geography in shaping the distributional consequences of trade. One of the major theor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Importing inequality: immigration and the top 1 percent

In this paper we study the contribution of migrants to the rise in UK top incomes. Using administrative data on the universe of UK taxpayers we show migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, wi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization and pandemics

We develop a model of human interaction to analyze the relationship between globalization and pandemics. Our framework provides joint microfoundations for the gravity equation for international trade and the Susceptible-...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Growing like China: firm performance and global production line position

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The long shadow of slavery: the persistence of slave owners in Southern law-making

This paper documents the persistence of the Southern slave owning elite in political power after the end of the American Civil War. We draw on a database of Texan state legislators between 1860 and 1900 and link them to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parental well-being in times of Covid-19 in Germany

We examine the differential effects of Covid-19 and related restrictions on individuals with dependent children in Germany. We specifically focus on the role of school and day care center closures, which may be regarded ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Subjective job insecurity and the rise of the precariat: evidence from the UK, Germany and the United States

There is a widespread belief that work is less secure than in the past, that an increasing share of workers are part of the ’precariat’. It has been hard to find evidence for this is objective measures of job security bu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Urban density and Covid-19

This paper estimates the link between population density and COVID-19 spread and severity in the contiguous United States. To overcome confounding factors, we use two Instrumental Variable (IV) strategies that exploit ge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Center-based care and parenting activities

We estimate the effects of center-based care on parenting activities with children using data from time diaries and a family survey for Germany. Our estimates imply that usage of center-based care reduces the amount of t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Generalized linear competition: from pass-through to policy

Economic policy and shifts in input market prices often have significant effects on the marginal costs of firms and can prompt strategic responses that make their impact hard to predict. We introduce "generalized linear ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International friends and enemies

We develop sufficient statistics of countries’ bilateral income and welfare exposure to foreign productivity shocks that are exact for small shocks in the class of models with a constant trade elasticity. For large shock...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalisation and urban polarisation

External trade affects the internal spatial structure of an economy, promoting growth in some cities or regions and decline in others. Internal adjustment to these changes has often proved to be extremely slow and painfu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Better together? Heterogeneous effects of tracking on student achievement

I study the effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement, exploiting institutional differences between German federal states. In all states, about 40% of students transition to separate academi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dream jobs

Understanding why certain jobs are ‘better’ than others and what implications they have for a worker’s career is clearly an important but still relatively unexplored question. We provide both a theoretical framework and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economics of skyscrapers: a synthesis

This paper provides a synthesis of the state of knowledge on the economics of skyscrapers. First, we document how vertical urban growth has gained pace over the course of the 20th century. Second, we lay out a simple the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gravity in international finance: evidence from fees on equity transactions

We shed light on the impact of institutional quality and information barriers on trade in financial services using a novel panel data set on revenue earned on domestic and cross-border equity securities underwriting tran...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why are pollution damages lower in developed countries? Insights from high income, high-particulate matter Hong Kong

Conventional wisdom suggests that pollution damages are high in less-developed countries because they are highly polluted. Using administrative data on the universe of births and deaths, we explore the morbidity and mort...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Offices scarce but housing scarcer: estimating the premium for London office conversions

The British system of land use planning is one of the most restrictive in the world. It substantially increases the costs of office space (Cheshire & Hilber, 2008; Cheshire & Dericks, 2020) and, especially in London, inc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigrant inventors and diversity in the age of mass migration

A possible unintended but damaging consequence of anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the policies it inspires, is that they may put high-skilled immigrants off more than low-skilled ones at times when countries and businesses ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Bank default risk propagation along supply chains: evidence from the UK

How does banks’ default risk affect the probability of default of non-financial businesses? The literature has addressed this question by focusing on the direct effects on the banks’ corporate customers – demonstrating t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Family background and the responses to higher SAT scores

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT system, we show that additional admission opportunities causally affect college choices. Students with high-educated parents change timing, colleges, and fields in ways that a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International financial flows and misallocation

We study the impact of international financial flows on credit allocation exploiting the early 2000s boom of capital inflows in Italy. Using detailed bank-firm matched data we compare the patterns of credit allocation of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Disrupted schooling: impacts on achievement from the Chilean school occupations

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter ca...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Automation, globalization and vanishing jobs: a labor market sorting view

We show, theoretically and empirically, that the effects of technological change associated with automation and offshoring on the labor market can substantially deviate from standard neoclassical conclusions when search ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Damned by dams? Infrastructure and conflict

This study investigates the impact of dams on local conflict across the world with georeferenced location information on dams and conflict events for the years 1989 to 2016. The identification strategy exploits exogenous...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Covid-19, lockdowns and well-being: evidence from Google trends

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to implement lockdowns. While lockdowns may help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends dat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All these worlds are yours, except India: the effectiveness of cash subsidies to export in Nepal

This paper studies the impact of a `textbook' ad-valorem export subsidy on firm-level export performance. The Cash Incentive Scheme for Exports (CISE) program offered by the government of Nepal offers a cash subsidy to f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

O brother, where start thou? Sibling spillovers on college and major choice in four countries

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Monopsony and the wage effects of migration

In a competitive labor market, immigration affects native wages only through its impact on marginal products. Under the sole assumption of constant returns, we show that a larger supply of migrants (keeping their skill m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing global production: theory and evidence from just-in-time supply chains

Global value chains are highly fragmented across countries and dominated by a few large multinational firms. But the challenges of an increasingly difficult international business environment are raising the question of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A survey of gender gaps through the lens of the industry structure and local labor markets

In this paper we discuss some strands of the recent literature on the evolution of gender gaps and their driving forces. We will revisit key stylized facts about gender gaps in employment and wages in a few high-income c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the productivity advantage of cities

Ever since Marshall (1890) agglomeration externalities have been viewed as the key factor explaining the existence of cities and their size. However, while the various micro foundations of agglomeration externalities str...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A natural experiment on job insecurity and fertility in France

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. We here argue that it reduces fertility amongst the employed. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by large private firms when th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does homeownership reduce crime? A radical housing reform in Britain

“Right to Buy” (RTB), a large-scale natural experiment by which incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily-subsidised prices, increased the homeownership rate in Britain by over 10 percentage poi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Environmental preferences and technological choices: is market competition clean or dirty?

This paper investigates the joint effect of consumers' environmental concerns and product-market competition on firms’ decisions whether to innovate “clean” or “dirty”. We first develop a step-by-step innovation model to...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor demand in the past, present and future

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. The...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rising protectionism and global value chains: quantifying the general equilibrium effects

Quantifying the effects of trade policy in the age of ’global value chains’ (GVCs) requires an enhanced analytical framework that takes the observed international input-output relations in due account. However, existing ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the economic impacts of mortgage credit expansion policies: evidence from help to buy

Mortgage credit expansion policies – such as UK’s Help to Buy (HtB) – aim to increase access to and affordability of owner-occupied housing and are widespread around the world. We take advantage of spatial discontinuitie...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Machiavelli versus concave utility functions: should bads be spread out or concentrated?

Is wellbeing higher if the same number of negative events is spread out rather than bunched in time? Should positive events be spread out or bunched? We answer these questions exploiting quarterly data on six positive an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Automating labor: evidence from firm-level patent data

Do higher wages lead to more automation innovation? To answer this question, we first introduce a new measure of automation by using the frequency of certain keywords in patent text to identify automation innovations in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The contribution of immigration to local labor market adjustment

The US suffers from persistent regional disparities in employment rates. In principle, these disparities should be eliminated by population mobility. Can immigration fulfil this role? Remarkably, since 1960, I show that ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The rise of agribusiness and the distributional consequences of policies on intermediated trade

Policies to encourage agribusinesses-led development of crop markets are high on the agenda of many policy-makers. Since the 1980s, several countries have moved to a model in which agribusinesses provide market access to...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Comparing conventional and machine-learning approaches to risk assessment in domestic abuse cases

We compare predictions from a conventional protocol-based approach to risk assessment with those based on a machine-learning approach. We first show that the conventional predictions are less accurate than, and have simi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who's paying for the U.S. tariffs? A longer-term perspective

Using data from 2018, a number of studies have found that recent U.S tariffs have been passed on entirely to U.S. importers and consumers. These results are surprising given that trade theory has long stressed that tarif...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Import competition, heterogeneous preferences of managers and productivity

When managers have objectives beyond maximizing monetary profits, inefficiencies may arise. An increase in competition may then force managers to improve the productivity of the firm in order to ensure survival. While th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intellectual property and the organization of the global value chain

This paper introduces the concept of intangible assets in a property rights model of sequential supply chains. Firms transmit knowledge to their suppliers to facilitate input customization. Yet, to avoid knowledge dissip...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The aggregate consequences of default risk: evidence from firm-level data

This paper studies the implications of perceived default risk for aggregate output and productivity. Using a model of credit contracts with moral hazard, we show that a firm’s probability of default is a sufficient stati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A local community course that raises mental wellbeing and pro-sociality

Although correlates of mental wellbeing have been extensively studied, relatively little is known about how to effectively raise mental wellbeing in local communities by means of intervention. We conduct a randomised con...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization and conflicts: the good, the bad and the ugly of corporations in Africa

Using georeferenced data on the affiliates and headquarters of multinational enterprises together with georeferenced conflict data, this work is the first to establish a causal link between the activities of multinationa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias

Using decadal census data since 1960, I cannot reject the hypothesis that new immigrants crowd out existing residents from US commuting zones and states one-for-one. My estimate is precise and robust to numerous specific...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade, productivity and (mis)allocation

We examine the gains from globalization in the presence of firm heterogeneity and potential resource misallocation. We show theoretically that without distortions, bilateral and export liberalizations increase aggregate ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exchange rates and consumer prices: evidence from Brexit

This paper studies how the depreciation of sterling following the Brexit referendum affected consumer prices in the United Kingdom. Our identification strategy uses input-output linkages to account for heterogeneity in e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade liberalization, input intermediaries and firm productivity: evidence from China

We investigate theoretically and empirically the role of wholesalers in mediating the productivity effects of trade liberalization. Intermediaries provide indirect access to foreign produced inputs. The productivity effe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The innovation premium to soft skills in low-skilled occupations

Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to analyze the wage premium to working in an innovative firm. We find that firms that are more R&D intensive pay higher wages on average, and this is particularly true ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The motivational cost of inequality: pay gaps reduce the willingness to pursue rewards

Factors beyond a person’s control, such as demographic characteristics at birth, often influence the availability of rewards an individual can expect for their efforts. We know surprisingly little how such pay-gaps due t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technical change and superstar effects: evidence from the roll-out of television

Technical change that improves economies of scale can generate fast income growth among top earners at the expense of everyone else. I test this classic “superstar model” in the labor market for entertainers where the hi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The intellectual spoils of war? Defense R&D, productivity and international spillovers

In the US and many other OECD countries, expenditures for defense-related R&D represent a key policy channel through which governments shape innovation, and dwarf all other public subsidies for innovation. We examine the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring the gains from labor specialization

We estimate the productivity effects of labor specialization using a judicial environment that offers a quasi-experimental setting well suited to this purpose. Judges in this environment are randomly assigned many differ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spillover effects from new housing supply

I estimate spillovers from new housing supply on house prices, crime rates, and household income. To estimate these effects, I use exogenous variation in supply induced by a housing subsidy implemented in middle-income n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic insecurity and the rise of the right

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention in social, academic and policy circles. However, there is no consensus as to its precise definition. Intuitively, economic insecurity is multi-faceted, making any compr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. W...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The heterogeneous impact of market size on innovation: evidence from French firm-level exports

We analyze how demand conditions faced by a firm impacts its innovation decisions. To disentangle the direction of causality between innovation and demand conditions, we construct a firm-level export demand shock which r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring and explaining management in schools: new approaches using public data

Why do some students learn more in some schools than others? One consideration receiving growing attention is school management. To study this, researchers need to be able to measure school management accurately and chea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does employee happiness have an impact on productivity?

This article provides quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between employee happiness and productivity in the field. We study the universe of call center sales workers at British Telecom (BT), one of the Unite...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industry concentration in Europe and North America

This report presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and bus...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Should I stay or should I go? Neighbors' effects on university enrollment

This paper investigates whether the decision to attend university depends on university enrollment of close neighbors. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and educational records from diff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reopening Pandora's box in search of a WTO-compatible industrial policy? The Brazil-taxation dispute

The Brazil-Taxation dispute concerns the complaints taken to the World Trade Organisation by the European Union and Japan against seven different Brazilian industrial subsidy programmes. One concerned the automotive sect...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When income effects are large: labor supply responses and the value of welfare transfers

I estimate the long-run income effect of welfare transfers on individual labor supply. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of survivor insurance recipients, I implement a regression discontinuity design aro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Understanding day care enrolment gaps

We document day care enrolment gaps by family background in a country with a universal day care system (Germany). Research demonstrates that children of less educated or foreign-born parents can benefit the most from day...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade shocks and credit reallocation

The effect of trade liberalization on welfare and economic activity remains one of the most important questions in economics. The literature identifies a number of key determinants that reduce the potential gains from tr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does light touch cluster policy work? Evaluating the tech city programme

Despite academic scepticism, cluster policies remain popular with policymakers. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a flagship UK technology cluster programme. I build a simple framework and identify effects using ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Inequalities in student to course match: evidence from linked administrative data

This paper examines inequalities in the match between student quality and university quality using linked administrative data from schools, universities and tax authorities. We analyse two measures of match at the univer...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does e-commerce reduce traffic congestion? Evidence from Alibaba Single Day shopping event

Traditional retail involves traffic both from warehouses to stores and from consumers to stores. E-commerce cuts intermediate traffic by delivering goods directly from the warehouses to the consumers. Although plenty of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The best versus the rest: divergence across firms during the global productivity slowdown

We document that labor productivity of the globally most productive firms – the “frontier” – has diverged from all other firms – the “rest” – throughout the 2000s. This divergence remains after controlling for capital in...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Building a productive workforce: the role of structured management practices

Firms’ hiring and firing decisions affect the entire labor market. Managers often make these decisions, yet the effects of management on labor allocation remains largely unexplored. To study the relationship between a fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the intangible impact of the Olympics using subjective well-being data

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in Lond...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What are the price effects of trade? Evidence from the US and implications for quantitative trade models

This paper finds that U.S. consumer prices fell substantially due to increased trade with China. With comprehensive price micro-data and two complementary identification strategies, we estimate that a 1pp increase in imp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vertical integration and foreclosure: evidence from production network data

This paper studies the prevalence of vertical market foreclosure using a novel dataset on U.S. and international buyer-seller relationships, and across a large range of industries. We find that relationships are more lik...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation union: costs and benefits of innovation policy coordination

In this paper, we document large heterogeneity in innovation policy and performance between old and new EU member states, and present firm-level evidence on the close link between foreign direct investment (FDI) spillove...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Residential mobility and unemployment in the UK

The UK has suffered from persistent spatial differences in unemployment rates for many decades. A low responsiveness of internal migration to unemployment is often argued to be an important cause of this problem. This pa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Competition and pass-through: evidence from isolated markets

We measure how pass-through varies with competition in isolated oligopolistic markets with captive consumers. Using daily pricing data from gas stations, we study how unanticipated and exogenous changes in excise duties ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Voting with their money: Brexit and outward investment by UK firms

We study the impact of the 2016 Brexit referendum on UK foreign direct investment. Using the synthetic control method to construct appropriate counterfactuals, we show that by March 2019 the Leave vote had led to a 17% i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Retail shocks and city structure

This paper evaluates the consequences of opening out-of-town big-boxes on the commercial structure of cities. I use a discontinuity in a commercial regulation in Spain that restricts the entry of big-box stores in munici...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dirty density: air quality and the density of American cities

We study whether urban density affects the exposure of city dwellers to ambient air pollution using satellite-derived measures of air quality for the contiguous United States. For identification, we rely on an instrument...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A toolkit of policies to promote innovation

Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to under-provide innovation due to the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the US and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summari...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic geography aspects of the Panama Canal

This paper studies how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 changed market access and influenced the economic geography of the United States. We compute shipment distances with and without the canal from each US count...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Willing to pay for security: a discrete choice experiment to analyse labour supply preferences

This paper investigates the extent to which labour supply preferences are responsible for the marked rise in atypical work arrangements in the UK and US. By employing vignettes in a discrete job choice experiment in a re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Ease versus noise: long-run changes in the value of transport (dis)amenities

For a complete cost-benefit analysis of durable infrastructures, it is important to understand how the value of non-market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long-run. We ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Widening the high school curriculum to include soft skill training: impacts on health, behaviour, emotional wellbeing and occupational aspirations

From 2020 the health and relationships aspects of Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education will be compulsory in UK schools for adolescents. However less is known about how it can be taught in an effective manner....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual consequences of occupational decline

What are the earnings and employment losses that workers suffer when demand for their occupations declines? To answer this question we combine forecasts on occupational employment changes, which allow us to identify unan...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892-2015

How has Polish inequality evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? To address this question, we construct the first series on the long-term distribution of income in Po...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology gaps, trade and income

This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level tech...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic incentives, home production and gender identity norms

We infer the role of gender identity norms from the reallocation of childcare across parents, following changes in their relative wages. By exploiting variation from a Swedish tax reform, we estimate the elasticity of su...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why unions: understanding how unions overcome the free-rider problem

This paper provides evidence for why individuals join unions instead of free-riding. I model membership as legal insurance. To test the model, I use the incidence of news stories concerning allegations against teachers i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vehicle currency pricing and exchange rate pass-through

Using detailed firm-level transactions data for UK imports, we find that invoicing in a vehicle currency is pervasive, with more than half of transactions in our sample invoiced in neither sterling nor the exporter's cur...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Commuting, migration and local joblessness

Britain suffers from persistent spatial disparities in employment rates. This paper develops an integrated framework for analyzing two forces expected to equalize economic opportunity across areas: commuting and migratio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and worker deskilling

This paper presents new evidence on international trade and worker outcomes. It examines a big world event that produced an unprecedentedly large shock to the UK exchange rate. In the 24 hours in June 2016 during which t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How to improve tax compliance? Evidence from population-wide experiments in Belgium

We study the impact of deterrence, tax morale, and simplifying information on tax compliance. We ran _ve experiments spanning the tax process which varied the communication of the tax administration with all income taxpa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade blocs and trade wars during the interwar period

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this partic...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tales of the city: what do agglomeration cases tell us about agglomeration in general?

This paper considers the heterogeneous microfoundations of agglomeration economies. It studies the co-location of industries to look for evidence of labor pooling, input sharing, and knowledge spillovers. The novel contr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trainspotting: 'good jobs', training and skilled immigration

While skilled immigration ceteris paribus provides an immediate boost to GDP per capita by adding to the human capital stock of the receiving economy, might it also reduce the number of ’good jobs’, i.e. those with train...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parents, schools and human capital differences across countries

This paper studies the contribution of parental influence in accounting for cross-country gaps in human capital achievements. We argue that the cross-country variation in unobserved parental characteristics is at least a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Education and geographical mobility: the role of the job surplus

Better-educated workers form many more long-distance job matches, and they move more quickly following local employment shocks. I argue this is a consequence of larger dispersion in wage offers, independent of geography....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Jihadi attacks, media and local hate crime

Empirical connections between local anti-Muslim hate crimes and international jihadi terror attacks are studied. Based upon rich administrative data from Greater Manchester Police, event studies of ten terror attacks rev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The comparative advantage of firms

Multiproduct firms dominate production, and their product turnover contributes substantially to aggregate growth. Theories propose that multiproduct firms grow by diversifying into products which need the same know-how o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A tale of comprehensive labor market reforms: evidence from the Italian jobs act

The Italian Jobs Act introduced a subsidy for new hirings as well as a new open ended labor contract based on graded security, with severance payments increasing with tenure, while phasing out the compulsory reinstatemen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does evaluation distort teacher effort and decisions? Quasi-experimental evidence from a policy of retesting students

Performance evaluation may change employee effort and decisions in unintended ways, for example, in multitask jobs where the evaluation measure captures only a subset of (differentially weights) the job tasks. We show ev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Affordability, financial innovation and the start of the housing boom

At their peak in 2005, roughly 60 percent of all purchase mortgage loans originated in the United States contained at least one non-traditional feature. These features, which allowed borrowers easier access to credit thr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Geography, competition and optimal multilateral trade policy

How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Childhood circumstances and young adulthood outcomes: the role of mothers' financial problems

We here consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The urban wage premium in imperfect labour markets

Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first establish that employers possess less wage-settin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovative events

We take a fresh look at firms’ innovation-productivity linkages, using novel data capturing new aspects of innovative activity. We combine UK administrative microdata, media and website content to develop experimental me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Missing trade in tasks: employer outsourcing in the gig economy

Only a small share of employers in high-wage locations procure services from abroad. We document heterogeneous employer adoption of an online labor market that facilitates trade in tasks with global workers. Job vacancie...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employee wellbeing, productivity and firm performance

Does higher employee wellbeing lead to higher productivity, and, ultimately, to tangible benefits to the bottom line of businesses? We survey the evidence and study this question in a meta-analysis of 339 independent res...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Valuing the environmental benefits of canals using house prices

The canal and waterway network in Britain provides a potentially valuable recreational and environmental amenity. In this paper, we estimate the value of this amenity based on how much households are willing to pay throu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of the 2018 trade war on U.S. prices and welfare

This paper explores the impacts of the Trump administration’s trade policy on prices and welfare. Over the course of 2018, the U.S. experienced substantial increases in the prices of intermediates and final goods, dramat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Making smart meters smarter the smart way

We report first results from a large scale randomized control trial of different forms of energy consumption feedback facilitated by smart meters and smart phone feedback apps. Nearly 40,000 customers of a large energy r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Searching for carbon leaks in multinational companies

Does unilateral climate change policy cause companies to shift the location of production, thereby creating carbon leakage? In this paper, we analyse the effect of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New media and competition: printing and Europe's transformation after Gutenberg

We study the role of book content in economic, religious, and institutional development after the introduction of printing, and the role of competition in determining the amount and content of local printing. We focus on...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Discrimination, managers, and firm performance: evidence from “Aryanizations” in Nazi Germany

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International buyers' sourcing and suppliers' markups in Bangladeshi garments

Large international buyers play a key role in global value chains. We exploit detailed transaction-level data on the usage of material inputs to study how Bangladeshi garment suppliers' markups vary across international ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do tax cuts produce more Einsteins? The impacts of financial incentives vs. exposure to innovation on the supply of inventors

Many countries provide financial incentives to spur innovation, ranging from tax incentives to research and development grants. In this paper, we study how such financial incentives affect individuals' decisions to pursu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The public sector and the misallocation of labor: evidence from a policy experiment in India

State-owned enterprises are often thought to represent a distortion in the labor market, but the implied efficiency losses have not been carefully estimated. This paper presents the first rigorous quantification of the a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Aggregation and the gravity equation

One of the most successful empirical relationships in international trade is the gravity equation, which relates bilateral trade flows between an origin and destination to bilateral trade frictions, origin characteristic...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Skill biased management: evidence from manufacturing firms

This paper investigates the link between management practices and workforce skills in manufacturing firms, exploiting geographical variation in the supply of human capital. Skills measures are constructed using newly com...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization and state capitalism: assessing Vietnam's accession to the WTO

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The origins of firm heterogeneity: a production network approach

This paper quantifies the origins of firm size heterogeneity when firms are interconnected in a production network. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, the paper develops a set of stylized fact...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where is the Land of Hope and Glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For England and Wales, a paucity of data has made this a difficult question to reliably answer. This paper p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Monetary policy, product market competition and growth

In this paper we argue that monetary easing fosters growth more in more credit-constrained environments, and the more so the higher the degree of product market competition. Indeed when competition is low, large rents al...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation and trade policy in a globalized world

How do import tariffs and R&D subsidies help domestic firms compete globally? How do these policies affect aggregate growth and economic welfare? To answer these questions we build a dynamic general equilibrium growth mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The inverted-U relationship between credit access and productivity growth

In this paper we identify two counteracting effects of credit access on productivity growth: on the one hand, better access to credit makes it easier for entrepreneurs to innovate; on the other hand, better credit access...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology, market structure and the gains from trade

We study the gains from trade in a new model with oligopolistic competition, firm heterogeneity, and innovation. Lowering trade costs reduces markups on domestic sales but increases markups on export sales, as firms do n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of the Brexit referendum result on subjective well-being

We study the effect of the Brexit referendum result on subjective well-being in the United Kingdom. Using a quasi-experimental design, we find that this outcome led to an overall decrease in subjective well-being in the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Subsidizing labor hoarding in recessions: the employment and welfare effects of short time work

The Great Recession has seen a revival of interest in policies encouraging labor hoarding by firms. Short time work (STW) policies, which consist in offering subsidies for hours reductions to workers in firms experiencin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rent sharing and inclusive growth

The long-run evolution of rent sharing is empirically studied. Based upon a comprehensive and harmonized panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over thirty five years, the paper reports evidence of a sign...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Organizing global supply chains: input-output linkages and vertical integration

We study whether and how the technological importance of an input – measured by its cost share – is related to the decision of whether to “make” or “buy” that input. Using detailed French international trade data and an ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The contribution of foreign migration to local labor market adjustment

The US suffers from large regional disparities in employment rates which have persisted for many decades. It has been argued that foreign migration offers a remedy: it “greases the wheels” of the labor market by accelera...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Preferential trade agreements and global sourcing

We study how a preferential trade agreement (PTA) affects international sourcing decisions, aggregate productivity and welfare under incomplete contracting and endogenous matching. Contract incompleteness implies underin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor specialization as a source of market frictions

This paper investigates why labor specialization brings additional frictions to the labor market. The intuition is that labor specialized firms rely on complementarity and firm-specific human capital, assigning high valu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

In-house and arms length: productivity heterogeneity and variation in organizational form

This paper analyzes how firms are organized in the U.S. hotel management industry. For most hotel brands, properties with intermediate room occupancy rates are relatively more likely to be managed by company employees ra...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The not-so-generalized effects of the generalized system of preferences

We use an empirical gravity equation approach to study how nonreciprocal trade preferences (NRTPs), enacted mainly through the Generalized System of Preferences, affect the exports of the beneficiary nations. In line wit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fiscal and education spillovers from charter school expansion

The fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for non-charter students are central issues in the debate over charter schools. Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter sc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Increasing differences between firms: market power and the macro-economy

A rich understanding of macro-economic outcomes requires taking into account the large (and increasing) differences between firms. These differences stem in large part from heterogeneous productivity rooted in managerial...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incubators, accelerators and regional economic development

A growing wave of co-location programmes promises to boost growth for young firms. Despite great public and policy interest we have little idea whether such programmes are effective. This paper categorises accelerators a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teacher effectiveness and classroom composition

This paper studies how the effectiveness of teachers varies by classroom composition, combining random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching practices based on a popular teacher-evaluation protocol. We fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The making of the modern metropolis: evidence from London

Modern metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of economic activity and the transport of millions of people each day between their residence and workplace. We use the revolution in transport technology from the i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Misallocation in the market for inputs: enforcement and the organization of production

The strength of contract enforcement determines how firms source inputs and organize production. Using microdata on Indian manufacturing plants, we show that production and sourcing decisions appear systematically distor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How do households value the future? Evidence from property taxes

Despite the near ubiquity of inter-temporal choice, there is little consensus on the rate at which individuals trade present and future costs and benefits. We contribute to this debate by estimating discount rates from e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic effects of Brexit - evidence from the stock market

We study stock market reactions to the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016 in order to assess investors’ expectations about the effects of leaving the European Union on the UK economy. Our results suggest that initial stoc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring urban economic density

At the heart of urban economics are agglomeration economies, which drive the existence and extent of cities and are also central to structural transformation and the urbanization process. This paper evaluates the use of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

History dependence in the housing market

Using data on the universe of housing transactions in England and Wales over a twenty-year period, we document a robust pattern of history dependence in housing markets. Sale prices and selling propensities are affected ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Foreign expansion, competition and bank risk

Using a novel dataset on the 15 European banks classified as G-SIBs from 2005 to 2014, we find that the impact of foreign expansion on risk is always negative and significant for most individual and systemic risk metrics...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why does education reduce crime?

Prior research shows reduced criminality to be a beneficial consequence of education policies that raise the school leaving age. This paper studies how crime reductions occurred in a sequence of state-level dropout age r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who teaches the teachers? A RCT of peer-to-peer observation and feedback in 181 schools

It is well established that teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student outcomes. However, to date there is scant robust quantitative research demonstrating that teacher training programs can ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The political economy of trade and migration: evidence from the US Congress

We systematically examine the drivers of U.S. congressmen's votes on trade and migration reforms since the 1970's. Standard trade theory suggests that reforms that lower barriers to goods and migrants should have similar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The spatial impacts of a massive rail disinvestment program: the Beeching axe

Transport investment is a popular policy instrument and many recent studies have investigated whether new infrastructure generates economic benefits and has spatial economic impacts. Our work approaches the question diff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teaching assistants, computers and classroom management: evidence from a randomised control trial

Many students still leave school without a good grasp of basic literacy, despite the negative implications for future educational and labour market outcomes. We evaluate a programme that involves changing how resources a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying wider economic impacts of agglomeration for transport appraisal: existing evidence and future directions

This paper is concerned with the Wider Economic Impacts (WEIs) of transport improvements that arise via scale economies of agglomeration. It reviews the background theory and empirical evidence on agglomeration, explains...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market potential and global growth over the long twentieth century

We examine the evolution of market potential and its role in driving economic growth over the long twentieth century. Theoretically, we exploit a structural gravity model to derive a closed-form solution for a widely-use...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Diffusion of social values through the lens of US newspapers

Changing attitudes are the result of a battle for hearts and minds in which agents for and against change try to persuade others. We know very little about this process. This paper develops a methodology for measuring se...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Of mice and merchants: trade and growth in the Iron Age

We study the causal connection between trade and development using one of the earliest massive trade expansions: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the Phoenicians. We cons...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The productivity-wage premium: does size still matter in a service economy?

Ever since Moore (1911) a large empirical and theoretical literature has established the existence of a firm size-wage premium. At the same time, a second regularity in empirical work, linking size and productivity, has ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic impacts of constraining home investments

We investigate how political backlash against wealthy investors in high-amenity places affects local residents. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment: the ‘Swiss Second Home Initiative’, which banned the construction of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Financial markets and the allocation of capital: the role of productivity

The efficient allocation of credit is a key element for the success of an economy. Traditional measures of allocative efficiency focus on the Q-theory of investment and, in particular, on the elasticity of finance to inv...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Geography, ties and knowledge flows: evidence from citations in mathematics

Using data on academic citations, career and educational histories of mathematicians, and disaggregated distance data for the world's top 1000 math departments, we study how geography and ties affect knowledge flows amon...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing trade: evidence from China and the US

We present a heterogeneous-firm model in which management ability increases both production efficiency and product quality. Combining six micro-datasets on management practices, production and trade in Chinese and Americ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The generation gap in direct democracy

We provide the first systematic documentation and analysis of a generation gap in direct democracy outcomes across a wide range of topics using postelection survey data covering more than 300 Swiss referenda and four dec...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brands in motion: how frictions shape multinational production

Following the 2016 Leave vote in the referendum on UK membership in the EU and the election of Donald Trump, trade agreements have entered a period of great instability. To predict the impact of possible disruptions to e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Currency unions, trade and heterogeneity

How do trade costs affect international trade? This paper offers a new approach. We rely on a flexible gravity equation that predicts variable trade cost elasticities, both across and within country pairs. We apply this ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The role of demand in land re-development

Several governments throughout the world apply policies aimed to re-mediate and recover vacant or idle land for other uses. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity of redevelopment, a crucial parameter for...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Have R&D spillovers changed?

This paper revisits the results of Bloom, Schankerman, and Van Reenen (2013) examining the impact of R&D on the performance of US firms, especially through spillovers. We extend their analysis to include an additional 15...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Come together: firm boundaries and delegation

Little is known about the relationship between firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within firms. We develop a model in which final good producers choose which suppliers to integrate and whether to deleg...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Medical marijuana laws and mental health in the United States

The consequences of legal access to medical marijuana for individual welfare are a matter of controversy. We contribute to the ongoing discussion by evaluating the impact of the staggered introduction and extension of me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Specialization matters in the firm size-wage gap

This study applies the O-ring theory to explain the firm-size wage premium. It focuses on the joint role of the division of labor and employee characteristics. Including the firm heterogeneity of occupations in a standar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Temperature, labor reallocation and industrial production: evidence from India

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in the demand for agricultural labor in India are...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm-to-firm connections in Colombian imports

The vast majority of world trade flows is between firms. Only recently has research in international trade started to emphasize the importance of the connections between exporters and importers both in aggregate trade fl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The billion pound drop: the blitz and agglomeration economies in London

This paper exploits locally exogenous variation in the location of bombs dropped during the Blitz to quantify the effect of density restrictions on agglomeration economies in London: an elite global city. Employing micro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Networks and trade

Trade occurs between firms both across borders and within countries, and the vast majority of trade transactions includes at least one large firm with many trading partners. This paper reviews the literature on firm-to-f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does gentrification displace poor households? An 'identification-via-interaction' approach

My theoretical model motivates an ‘identification-via-interaction’ (IvI) approach that separates the causal impact of gentrification on poor exits from endogenous channels. In the empirical analysis, I create a measure o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Poorly measured confounders are more useful on the left than on the right

Researchers frequently test identifying assumptions in regression based research designs (which include instrumental variables or difference-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the right hand...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fast track to growth? Railway access, population growth and local displacement in 19th century Switzerland

We study the effect of railway access on population growth in 19th century Switzerland. Our analysis is based on geo-referenced railway network information and an inconsequential units IV approach. Gaining direct railway...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The bedroom tax

Housing subsidies for low income households are a central pillar of many welfare systems, but an expensive one. This paper investigates the consequences of an unusual policy aimed at reducing the burden of these subsidie...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pension shocks and wages

How do wages respond to firm-level idiosyncratic cost shocks? We create a unique dataset that links longitudinal data on workers’ compensation to the unexpected costs that UK firms have been forced to pay to plug large d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Prices, policing and policy: the dynamics of crime booms and busts

In many historical episodes, the extent of criminal activity has displayed booms and busts. One very clear example is the case of metal crime, where in the face of big increases in value driven by world commodity prices,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Guns, environment and abortion: how single-minded voters shape politicians decisions

We study how electoral incentives affect policy choices on secondary issues, which only minorities of voters care intensely about. We develop a model in which office and policy motivated politicians choose to support or ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changing the structure of minimum wages: firm adjustment and wage spillovers

This paper analyses the economic impact of a significant change to the structure of a minimum wage setting policy. The context is the United Kingdom where government mandated an unexpected change in the structure of mini...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Beyond tariff reductions: what extra boost from trade agreement provisions?

There is a growing recognition that for developed economies, like the UK, tariff-free market access is just one of a number of measures that ease cross-border trade flows. Modern trade agreements go beyond tariff reducti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of minimum wages on low-wage jobs: evidence from the United States using a bunching estimator

We propose a novel method that infers the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it. Using st...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teacher turnover: does it matter for pupil achievement?

We add to a small literature examining whether teacher turnover affects academic achievement, focussing on age-16, state secondary school students, using a unique dataset of linked students and teachers in England. We ad...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Higher education funding reforms: a comprehensive analysis of educational and labour market outcomes in England

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the funding of higher education in England on students’ choices and outcomes. Over the last two decades – through three major reforms in 1998, 2006 and 2012 – undergraduat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All in the family? CEO choice and firm organization

Family firms are the most prevalent firm type in the world, particularly in emerging economies. Dynastic family firms tend to have lower productivity, though what explains their underperformance is still an open question...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Autonomous schools and strategic pupil exclusion

This paper studies whether pupil performance gains achieved by autonomous schools – specifically academy schools in England – can be attributed to the strategic exclusion of poorly performing pupils. In England there hav...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Oil discoveries and education spending in the Postbellum South

This paper studies the effect of oil wealth on the provision of education in the early 20th century United States. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields, I find that oil wealth increased loc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

From final goods to inputs: the protectionist effect of rules of origin

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Surprise! Out-of-network billing for emergency care in the United States

Using insurance claims data capturing 8.9 million emergency episodes, we show that in 22% of cases, patients attended in-network hospitals, but were treated by out-of-network physicians. We find that out-of-network billi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Politics, hospital behaviour and health care spending

This paper examines the link between legislative politics, hospital behaviour, and health care spending. When trying to pass sweeping legislation, congressional leaders can attract votes by adding targeted provisions tha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The social origins of inventors

In this paper, we merge three datasets - individual income data, patenting data, and IQ data - to analyze the deterninants of an individual’s probability of inventing. We find that: (i) parental income matters even after...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

It's time to learn: understanding the differences in returns to instruction time

As hours per day are inherently a limited resource, increasing daily instruction time reduces the amount of time pupils can dedicate to other activities outside school. We study how the effect of longer school days on ac...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The productivity puzzle and misallocation: an Italian perspective

Productivity has recently slowed down in many economies around the world. A crucial challenge in understanding what lies behind this \productivity puzzle" is the still short time span for which data can be analysed. An e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in America by using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records. We establish three sets of results. First, chi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic integration, foreign investment and international trade: the effects of membership of the European Union

This paper investigates the importance of economic integration in simultaneously fostering foreign direct investment (FDI) and international trade. These have rarely been analyzed jointly using contemporary econometric m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Special economic zones and WTO compliance: evidence from the Dominican Republic

Special economic zones (SEZ), one of the most important instruments of industrial policy used in developing countries, often impose export share requirements (ESR). That is, firms located in SEZ are required to export mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tax simplicity and heterogeneous learning

We study the effects of fiscal incentives for self-employment using new French tax data from 1994 to 2012. France serves as a good quasi-laboratory: It has three fiscal regimes - or modes of taxation - for the self-emplo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Supplier search and re-matching in global sourcing: Theory and evidence from China

In this paper, we consider a dynamic search-and-matching problem of a firm with its intermediate input supplier. In our model, a headquarter currently matched with a supplier, has an interest to find and collaborate with...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Missing growth from creative destruction

Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products based on surviving products, which may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. Using U.S. Census data, we apply two ways of assessi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Aggregating from micro to macro patterns of trade

We develop a new framework for aggregating from micro to macro patterns of trade. We derive price indexes that determine comparative advantage across countries and sectors and the aggregate cost of living. If firms and p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early-life correlates of later-life well-being: evidence from the Wisconsin longitudinal study

We here use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to provide one of the first analyses of the distal (early-life) and proximal (later-life) correlates of older-life subjective well-being. Unusually, we have tw...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender and promotions: evidence from academic economists in France

The promotion system for French academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women. Promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information bot...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The interconnections between services and goods trade at the firm-level

In this paper we study how international trade in goods and services interact at the firm level. Using a rich dataset on Belgian firms during the period 1995-2005, we show that: i) firms are much more likely to source se...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Product diversification in Indian manufacturing

The presence of global value chains challenges the neoclassical idea of the firm since it implies firms are not monolithic but are rather interdependent on the larger economic environment. Examining establishments, the s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Structural adjustments and international trade: theory and evidence from China

This paper studies how changes in factor endowment, technology, and trade costs jointly determine the structural adjustments, which are defined as changes in distributions of production and exports. We document the struc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Internalizing global value chains: a firm-level analysis

In recent decades, advances in information and communication technology and falling trade barriers have led firms to retain within their boundaries and in their domestic economies only a subset of their production stages...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Frontier knowledge and scientific production: evidence from the collapse of international science

We show that WWI and the subsequent boycott against Central scientists severely interrupted international scientific cooperation. After 1914, citations to recent research from abroad decreased and paper titles became les...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Twin peaks

Received wisdom suggests that most exporters sell the majority of their output domestically. In this paper, however, we show that the distribution of export intensity not only varies substantially across countries, but i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The productivity slowdown and the declining labor share: a neoclassical exploration

We explore the possibility that a global productivity slowdown is responsible for the widespread decline in the labor share of national income. In a neoclassical growth model with endogenous human capital accumulation a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Risk-based selection in unemployment insurance: evidence and implications

This paper studies whether adverse selection can rationalize a universal mandate for unemployment insurance (UI). Building on a unique feature of the unemployment policy in Sweden, where workers can opt for supplemental ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Efficiency in large markets with firm heterogeneity

Abstract Empirical work has drawn attention to the high degree of productivity differences within industries, and its role in resource allocation. In a benchmark monopolistically competitive economy, productivity differe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The end of free college in England: implications for quality, enrolments and equity

Despite increasing financial pressures on higher education systems throughout the world, many governments remain resolutely opposed to the introduction of tuition fees, and some countries and states where tuition fees ha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Healthy business? Managerial education and management in healthcare

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals that are closer t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brexit: the economics of international disintegration

This paper reviews the literature on the likely economic consequences of Brexit and considers the lessons of the Brexit vote for the future of European and global integration. Brexit will make the United Kingdom poorer b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Equity crowdfunding and early stage entrepreneurial finance: damaging or disruptive?

Equity crowdfunding (ECF) offers founders of new ventures an online social media marketplace where they can access a large number of investors who, in exchange for an ownership stake, provide finance for business opportu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Robot arithmetic: can new technology harm all workers or the average worker?

It is well-established that new technology can cause large changes in relative wages and inequality. But there are also claims, based largely on verbal expositions, that new technology will harm workers on average or eve...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are ideas getting harder to find?

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can raising instructional time crowd out student pro-social behaviour? Unintended consequences of a German high school reform

We study whether raising instructional time can crowd out student pro-social behaviour. To this end, we exploit a large educational reform in Germany that has raised weekly instructional hours for high school students by...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Goods and factor market integration: A quantitative assessment of the EU enlargement

The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with trade in goods a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average of adulthood. We her...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Specialization in bank lending: evidence from exporting firms

We develop an empirical approach for identifying specialization in bank lending using granular data on borrower activities. We illustrate the approach by characterizing bank specialization by export market, combining ban...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The labor market effects of refugee waves: reconciling conflicting results

An influential strand of research has tested for the effects of immigration on natives’ wages and employment using exogenous refugee supply shocks as natural experiments. Several studies have reached conflicting conclusi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic functioning of online drugs markets

The economic functioning of online drug markets using data scraped from online platforms is studied. Analysis of over 1.5 million online drugs sales shows online drugs markets tend to function without the significant mor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

War, migration and the origins of the Thai sex industry

This paper analyzes the determinants behind the spatial distribution of the sex industry in Thailand. We relate the development of the sex industry to an early temporary demand shock, i.e., U.S. military presence during ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The great divergence(s)

This report provides new evidence on the increasing dispersion in wages and productivity using novel micro-aggregated firm-level data from 16 countries. First, the report documents an increase in wage and productivity di...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

UK trade and FDI: a post-Brexit perspective

Leaving the EU will change the UK’s economic relations with the rest of the world. This paper discusses the UK’s role in the global economy and the consequences of Brexit for the UK’s trade, investment and living standar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating market consolidation in mobile communications

We study the dual relationship between market structure and prices and between market structure and investment in mobile telecommunications. Using a uniquely constructed panel of mobile operators’ prices and accounting i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The key determinants of happiness and misery

Understanding the key determinants of people’s life satisfaction will suggest policies for how best to reduce misery and promote wellbeing. This paper provides evidence from survey data on USA, Australia, Britain and Ind...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The hospital as a multi-product firm: the effect of hospital competition on value-added indicators of clinical quality

There is increasing international interest in using Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) to assess health care provider performance. PROMs are a fundamental advance on existing indicators of health care quality in t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reallocation and secularization: the economic consequences of the protestant reformation

The Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, was both a shock to the market for religion and a first-order economic shock. We study its impact on the allocation of resources between the religious and secular sectors in...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The fall of the labor share and the rise of superstar firms

The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International expansion and riskiness of banks

We exploit an original dataset on European G-SIBs to assess how banks’ internationalization affects risk in the banking sector. We find a robust negative correlation between foreign expansion and banking risk as captured...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-Level analysis

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immigratio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Turbulence, firm decentralization and growth in bad times

What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? Using two large micro datasets on firm decentralization from US administrative data and 10 OECD countries, we find that firms that delegated more power fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The costs and benefits of leaving the EU: trade effects

This paper estimates the welfare effects of Brexit, focusing on trade and fiscal transfers. We use a standard quantitative general equilibrium trade model with many countries and sectors and trade in intermediates, as in...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What’s in a name? Expectations, heuristics and choice during a period of radical school reform

Education policy worldwide has sought to incentivize school improvement and facilitate pupil-school matching by introducing reforms that promote autonomy and choice. Understanding the way in which families form preferenc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Concentrating on the fall of the labor share

In this paper, we discuss an explanation for the fall in share of labour in GDP based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, prod...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The political legacy of entertainment TV

We study the political impact of entertainment television in Italy exploiting the staggered introduction of Berlusconi's commercial TV network, Mediaset, in the early 1980s. We find that individuals with early access to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happiness at work

Happiness is typically defined by how people experience and evaluate their lives as a whole. Since the majority of people spend much of their lives at work, it is critically important to gain a solid understanding of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is distance dead? Face-to-face communication and productivity in teams

Has technology made face-to-face communication redundant? We investigate using a natural experiment in an organisation where a worker must communicate complex electronic information to a colleague. Productivity is higher...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teacher quality, test scores and non-cognitive skills: evidence from primary school teachers in the UK

Schooling can produce both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, both of which are important determinants of adult outcomes. Using very rich data from a UK birth cohort study, I estimate teacher value added (VA) models for...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global banking: risk taking and competition

Direct involvement of global banks in local retail activities can reduce risk-taking by promoting local competition. We develop this argument through a model in which multinational banks operate simultaneously in differe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What drives differences in management?

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of “structured” management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variatio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multi-product firms and product quality

We examine the global operations of multi-product firms. We present a flexible heterogeneous-firm trade model with either limited or strong scope for quality differentiation. Using customs data for China during 2002-2006...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality in early years settings and children’s school achievement

Childcare quality is often thought to be important for influencing children’s subsequent attainment at school. The English Government regulates the quality of early education by setting minimum levels of qualifications f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parental sleep and employment: evidence from a British cohort study

We show that sleep deprivation exerts a strong negative effect on labour market performance. We exploit variations in child sleep quality to instrument for parental sleep quality. A one-hour reduction in sleep duration s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Home ownership and social mobility

This paper extends the literature on social mobility to investigate intergenerational links in home ownership, an important marker of wealth. Repeated cross sectional data show that home ownership rates have fallen rapid...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tenure in office and public procurement

We study the impact of politicians' tenure in office on the outcomes of public procurement. To this purpose, we match a data set on the politics of Italian municipal governments to a data set on the procurement auctions ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic consequences of family policies: lessons from a century of legislation in high-income countries

We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and ferti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fertility and mothers' labor supply: new evidence using time-to-conception

We analyze the impact of children on their mothers' labor market outcomes in the UK. We use time-to-conception of the first child as an exogenous variation in the probability of having more children. We find that having ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The paradox of the Joneses: superstar houses and mortgage frenzy in suburban America

Despite a major upscaling of suburban houses over the last decades, house satisfaction has remained steady in the United States. I show that upward comparison in size can explain this paradox, as top housing size mirrore...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is modern technology responsible for jobless recoveries?

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. One possible explanation for these “jobless” recoveries is rooted in technological change: middle-skill jobs, often...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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CEP discussion paper

Diversity and neighbourhood satisfaction

This paper investigates the impact of ethnic diversity on individuals’ overall satisfaction with and other aspects of their neighbourhood. It uses panel data and a variety of empirical methods to control for potential en...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The diffusion of knowledge via managers' mobility

Better managers and managerial practices lead to better firm performance. Yet, little is known about what happens when managers move across firms. Does a firm hiring a good manager improve its performance? If yes is ther...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Distorted monopolistic competition

We characterize the equilibrium and optimal resource allocations in a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with multiple asymmetric sectors and heterogeneous firms. We first derive general results for ad...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Larrikin youth: new evidence on crime and schooling

This paper reports new evidence on the causal link between education and male youth crime using individual level state-wide administrative data for Queensland, Australia. Enactment of the Earning or Learning education re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unexpected school reform: academisation of primary schools in England

The change of government in 2010 provoked a large structural change in the English education landscape. Unexpectedly, the new government offered primary schools the chance to have ‘the freedom and the power to take contr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the comparative advantage of U.S. manufacturing: evidence from the shale gas revolution

This paper provides novel empirical evidence of the effects of a plausibly exogenous change in relative factor prices on United States manufacturing production and trade. The shale gas revolution has led to (very) large ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Foreign direct investment and the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union

This paper investigates whether and to what extent foreign direct investment inflows into the United Kingdom are caused by its membership in the European Union (EU). It reports two main sets of econometric estimates: (a)...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantitative spatial economics

The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until recent...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The loss of production work: evidence from quasi-experimental identification of labour demand functions

This paper examines changes in the structure of labour demand in plant-level panel data. I exploit variation in wages across local labour markets induced by the collapse of Finland’s Soviet-dependent industry in the earl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the size distribution of firms: evidence from the German Empire

What is the effect of trade on the size distribution of firms? We collect historical data between 1882 and 1907 from the German Empire to address this question. Our data allow us to match three data sets according to the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Aggregate recruiting intensity

We develop a model of firm dynamics with random search in the labor market where hiring firms exert recruiting effort by spending resources to fill vacancies faster. Consistent with micro evidence, in the model fast-grow...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Financial system architecture and the patterns of international trade

Countries differ on the extent to which their financial system relies on banks or on the financial market. We offer a model featuring a possible two-way relationship between countries’ financial system architecture and t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Colocation and knowledge diffusion: evidence from million dollar plants

This paper uses the entry of large corporations into U.S. counties during the 1980s and 1990s to analyse the effect of plant opening on knowledge spillovers to local inventors. We use a difference-in-differences identifi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Rosie like riveting? Male and female occupational choices

Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps have weakened over time. Here, we explore the possibility that women and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A unified approach to estimating demand and welfare

The measurement of price changes, economic welfare, and demand parameters is currently based on three disjoint approaches: macroeconomic models derived from time-invariant utility functions, microeconomic estimation base...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic impact of universities: evidence from across the globe

We develop a new dataset using UNESCO source materials on the location of nearly 15,000 universities in about 1,500 regions across 78 countries, some dating back to the 11th Century. We estimate fixed effects models at t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

STEM graduates and secondary school curriculum: does early exposure to science matter?

Increasing the number of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) university graduates is considered a key element for long-term productivity and competitiveness in the global economy. Still, little is known abou...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Product mix and firm productivity responses to trade competition

We document how demand shocks in export markets lead French multi-product exporters to re-allocate the mix of products sold in those destinations. In response to positive demand shocks, those French firms skew their expo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The host with the most? The effects of the Olympic Games on happiness

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal infer...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wage flexibility and employment fluctuations: evidence from the housing sector

Many economists suspect that downward nominal wage rigidities in ongoing labor contracts are an important source of employment fluctuations over the business cycle but there is little direct empirical evidence on this co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

Would moving to relative performance contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and performance? To address this, we exploit the large rise in relative performance awards and the share of equity pay in the UK over ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Powering education

More than 1.3 billion people worldwide have no access to electricity and this has first-order effects on several development dimensions. In this paper we focus on the link between access to light and education. We random...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Local and sectoral import spillovers in Sweden

In this paper I investigate the relevance and explore the nature of import spillovers on the firms' decision to start importing using an exceptionally detailed data set on Swedish firms' imports, at the product-level and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Without my medal on my mind: counterfactual thinking and other determinants of athlete emotions

How achievement makes people feel depends upon counterfactual thoughts about what could have been. One body of evidence for this comes from studies of observer ratings of Olympians' happiness, which suggests that categor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Production networks, geography and firm performance

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships, geography and the structure of the production network in firm performance. We develop a simple model where firms can outsource tasks and search for supp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does competition from private surgical centres improve public hospitals' performance? Evidence from the English National Health Service

This paper examines the impact of competition from government-facilitated entry of private, specialty surgical centres on the efficiency and case mix of incumbent public hospitals within the English NHS. We exploit the f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management as a technology?

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Product switching and the business cycle

This paper explores role of product adding and dropping within manufacturing firms over the business cycle. While a substantial body of work has explored the importance of the extensive margins of firm entry and exit in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Protectionism through exporting: subsidies with export share requirements in China

We study the effect of subsidies subject to export share requirements (ESR) - that is, conditioned on a firm exporting at least a given fraction of its output - on exports, the intensity of competition and welfare, throu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exporter dynamics and partial-year effects

Two identical firms that start exporting in different months, one each in January and December, will report dramatically different exports for the first calendar year. This partial-year effect biases down first year expo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating border effects: the impact of spatial aggregation

Trade data are typically reported at the level of regions or countries and are therefore aggregates across space. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of standard gravity estimation to spatial aggregation. We bu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The elusive employment effect of the minimum wage

There is a huge body of empirical research on the employment effect of the minimum wage that has failed to clearly demonstrate the negative effect that so many economists strongly believe to find. This paper reviews the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of discretion on procurement performance

We run a regression discontinuity design analysis to document the causal effect of increasing buyers' discretion on procurement outcomes in a large database for public works in Italy. Works with a value above a given thr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Two-sided heterogeneity and Trade

This paper develops a multi-country model of international trade that provides a simple micro-foundation for buyer-seller relationships in trade. We explore a rich dataset that identifies buyers and sellers in trade and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

"Teaching to teach" literacy

Significant numbers of people have very low levels of literacy in many OECD countries and, because of this, face significant labour market penalties. Despite this, it remains unclear what teaching strategies are most use...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where does the wind blow? Green preferences and spatial misallocation in renewable energy sector

Are "greener" investments less efficient? This paper looks at the location choices by wind power investors. I measures the efficiency loss in this sector due to wrong project location and explore the factors contributing...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rethinking deindustrialization

Manufacturing in high-income countries is on the decline and Denmark is no exception. Manufacturing employment and the number of firms have been shrinking as a share of the total and in absolute levels. This paper uses a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Politics in the family: nepotism and the hiring decisions of Italian firms

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals’ labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a rando...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Team adaptation

We model an organization as a team choosing between a status quo project and a potentially superior alternative. We show that the members’ concern for each other’s motivation leads to a lack of communication, resulting i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global firms

Research in international trade has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, as attention has shifted from countries and industries towards the firms actually engaged in international trade. The now-standard hete...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Liberation technology: mobile phones and political mobilization in Africa

Can digital information and communication technology (ICT) foster mass political mobilization? We use a novel geo-referenced dataset for the entire African continent between 1998 and 2012 on the coverage of mobile phone ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

State capacity and public goods: institutional change, human capital and growth in early modern Germany

What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study legal reforms that established mass public education and increased state capacity in German cities during the 1500s. These fundam...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How have EU's trade agreements impacted consumers?

Over the past two decades, the European Commission has negotiated a number of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) which contain both traditional elements of bilateral tariff reductions, as well as additional liberalisation meas...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management practices, workforce selection and productivity

Recent research suggests that much of the cross-firm variation in measured productivity is due to differences in use of advanced management practices. Many of these practices – including monitoring, goal setting, and the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Special and differential treatment for developing countries

Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries (SDT) constitutes a central feature of the GATT/WTO system. Its formal goal is to foster export-led growth in developing countries. Its theoretical foundations ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The sovereign-bank diabolic loop and ESBies

We propose a simple model of the sovereign-bank diabolic loop, and establish four results. First, the diabolic loop can be avoided by restricting banks domestic sovereign exposures relative to their equity. Second, equit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do tax incentives for research increase firm innovation? An RD design for R&D

We present evidence of a causal impact of research and development (R&D) tax incentives on innovation. We exploit a change in the asset-based size thresholds for eligibility for R&D tax subsidies and implement a Regressi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Relational knowledge transfers

An expert with general knowledge trains a cash-constrained novice. Faster training increases the novice’s productivity and his ability to compensate the expert; it also shrinks the stock of knowledge yet to be transferre...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International competition and labor market adjustment

How does welfare change in the short- and long-run in high wage countries when integrating with low wage economies like China? Even if consumers benefit from lower prices, there can be significant welfare losses from inc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The evolution of gender gaps in industrialized countries

Women in developed economies have made major inroads in labor markets throughout the past century, but remaining gender differences in pay and employment seem remarkably persistent. This paper documents long-run trends i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

One Mandarin benefits the whole clan: hometown favoritism in an authoritarian regime

We study patronage politics in authoritarian Vietnam, using an exhaustive panel of 603 ranking officials from 2000 to 2010 to estimate their promotions’ impact on infrastructure in their hometowns of patrilineal ancestry...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Models of affective decision-making: how do feelings predict choice?

Intuitively, how we feel about potential outcomes will determine our decisions. Indeed, one of the most influential theories in psychology, Prospect Theory, implicitly assumes that feelings govern choice. Surprisingly, h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Swimming upstream: input-output linkages and the direction of product adoption

Multiproduct firms dominate production, and their product turnover contributes substantially to aggregate growth. Firms continually adapt their product mix, but what determines which products firms expand into? Theories ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reservation wages and the wage flexibility puzzle

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model – even if wa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Stagnation traps

We provide a Keynesian growth theory in which pessimistic expectations can lead to very persistent, or even permanent, slumps characterized by unemployment and weak growth. We refer to these episodes as stagnation traps,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Minimum wages and firm value

How does the value of a firm change in response to a minimum wage hike? The evidence we have to date is not well-suited to answer this question, principally because events that have been studied are not completely unknow...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Balanced growth despite Uzawa

Evidence for the United States suggests balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and less than unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theore...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a new econometric framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation among the three unrestricted. We do this by systematically ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of trade liberalization on firm-level profits: an event-study approach

I use an event study approach to present novel evidence on the impact of trade liberalization on firm-level profits. Using the uncertainty surrounding the negotiation and ratification process of the Canada-United States ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Top incomes and human well-being around the world

The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about how the rising top income shares affect human wel...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Flooded cities

Does economic activity relocate away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which are among the costliest and most common natural disasters. Over the past...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity and organization in Portuguese firms

The productivity of firms is, at least partly, determined by a firm's actions and decisions. One of these decisions involves the organization of production in terms of the number of layers of management the firm decides ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Testing means-tested aid

Inequalities do not end once students enter higher education. Yet, the majority of papers on the effectiveness of higher education aid examine its impact on college enrolment. In this paper, we provide evidence on the ca...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The price ain't right? Hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured

We use insurance claims data covering 28 percent of individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance in the US to study the variation in health spending on the privately insured, examine the structure of insurer-hosp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The youngest get the pill: ADHD misdiagnosis and the production of education in Germany

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a leading diagnosed health condition among children in many developed countries but the causes underlying these high levels of ADHD remain highly controversial. Recent r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International technology transfer and domestic innovation: evidence from the high-speed rail sector in China

How does the transfer of advanced technology spur innovation in developing countries? This paper exploits the large-scale introduction of high-speed railway (HSR) technology into China in 2004 as a natural experiment to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Graduate returns, degree class premia and higher education expansion in the UK

We investigate the extent to which graduate returns vary according to the class of degree achieved by UK university students and examine changes over time in estimated degree class premia. Using a variety of complementar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do people seek to maximize their subjective well-being?

In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well-Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among other...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Information frictions and adverse selection: policy interventions in health insurance markets

This paper develops and implements a general framework to study insurance market equilibrium and evaluate policy interventions in the presence of choice frictions. Friction-reducing policies can increase welfare by facil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The persistence of a banking crisis

This paper analyses the effects of bank lending on GDP and employment. Following losses on international financial markets in 2008/09, a large German bank cut its lending to the German economy. I exploit variation in dep...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Diversification through trade

A widely held view is that openness to international trade leads to higher GDP volatility, as trade increases specialization and hence exposure to sector-specific shocks. We revisit the common wisdom and argue that when ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Short and long-term effects of unemployment on fertility

Scholars have been examining the relationship between fertility and unemployment for more than a century. Most studies find that fertility falls with unemployment in the short run, but it is not known whether these negat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multitask agents and incentives: The case of teaching and research for university professors

This paper evaluates the behavioural responses of multitask agents to the provision of incentives skewed towards one task only. In particular it studies the case of strong research incentives for university professors an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Commuting, migration and local employment elasticities

Many changes in the economic environment are local, including policy changes and infrastructure investments. The effect of these changes depends crucially on the ability of factors to move in response. Therefore a key ob...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The unbearable divergence of unemployment in Europe

Unemployment in Europe is not only “too high”, it is also too different across countries that belong to a monetary union. In this paper we i) document this increasing heterogeneity, ii) try to explain it and iii) draw fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Distaste for centralization: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland

Do people care about the degree of centralization? This paper examines the effects of local centralization reforms on individuals' well-being using a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland. The results reveal that centr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of contract enforcement costs on outsourcing and aggregate productivity

Legal institutions affect economic outcomes, but how much? This paper documents how costly supplier contract enforcement shapes firm boundaries, and quantifies the impact of this transaction cost on aggregate productivit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Contracting and the division of the gains from trade

This paper examines the microstructure of import markets and the division of the gains from trade among consumers, importers and exporters. When exporters and importers transact through anonymous markets, double marginal...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early maternal employment and non-cognitive outcomes in early childhood and adolescence: evidence from British birth cohort data

We analyse the relationship between early maternal employment and child emotional and behavioural outcomes in early childhood and adolescence. Using rich data from a cohort of children born in the UK in the early 1990s, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring economic policy uncertainty

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence – including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles – indicate that our index proxies for m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Merger policy in a quantitative model of international trade

In a two-country international trade model with oligopolistic competition, we study the conditions on market structure and trade costs under which a merger policy designed to benefit domestic consumers is too tough or to...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How firms export: processing vs. ordinary trade with financial frictions

The fragmentation of production across borders allows firms to make and export final goods, or to perform only intermediate stages of production by processing imported inputs for re-exporting. We examine how financial fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of police response time on crime detection

Police agencies devote vast resources to minimising the time that it takes them to attend the scene of a crime. Despite this, the long-standing consensus is that police response time has no meaningful effect on the likel...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Relational contracts and supplier turnover in the global economy

Headquarters and their specialized component suppliers have a vital interest in establishing long-term collaborations. When formal contracts are not enforceable, such efficiency enhancing cooperations can be establi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Crime, compulsory schooling laws and education

Do compulsory schooling laws reduce crime? Previous evidence for the U.S. from the 1960s and 1970s suggests they do, primarily working through their effect on educational attainment to generate a causal impact on crime. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Loss aversion on the phone

We analyze consumer switching between mobile tariff plans using consumer-level panel data. Consumers receive reminders from a specialist price-comparison website about the precise amount they could save by switching to a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The benefits of forced experimentation: striking evidence from the London Underground network

We estimate that a significant fraction of commuters on the London underground do not travel their optimal route. Consequently, a tube strike (which forced many commuters to experiment with new routes) taught commuters a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intrafirm trade and vertical fragmentation in U.S. multinational corporations

Using firm-level data, we document two new facts regarding intrafirm trade and the activities of the foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations. First, intrafirm trade is concentrated among a small number of l...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Academies 2: the new batch

The English education system has undergone a large restructuring programme through the introduction of academy schools. The most salient feature of these schools is that, despite remaining part of the state sector, they ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumption smoothing and the welfare cost of uncertainty

What is the effect of income uncertainty on individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfal...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The introduction of academy schools to England's education

We study the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past amongst advanced countries – the introduction of academy schools to English secondary e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Media, markets and institutional Change: evidence from the protestant reformation

This research studies the role of competition in the diffusion of radical ideas and institutional change during the Protestant Reformation. We construct a new measure of religious content in the media using data on all k...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Would you choose to be happy? Tradeoffs between happiness and the other dimensions of life in a large population survey

A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New media, competition and growth: European cities After Gutenberg

This research studies how variations in competition and in media content characterized the use and impact of Gutenberg's printing press technology during the European Renaissance. The research constructs annual firm-leve...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Job loss at home: children's school performance during the great recession in Spain

This paper studies the effect of parental job loss on children's school performance during the Great Recession in Spain, using an original panel dataset for students observed since the beginning of the crisis in a school...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does worker wellbeing affect workplace performance?

This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees’ subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

European identity and redistributive preferences

How important is spatial identity in shifting preferences for redistribution? This paper takes advantage of within-country variability in the adoption of a single currency as an instrument to examine the impact of the re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The optimal timing of UI benefits: theory and evidence from Sweden

This paper provides a simple, yet general framework to analyze the optimal time profile of benefits during the unemployment spell. We derive simple sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the insurance value and incenti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Informal care and the great recession

Macroeconomic downturns can have both an important impact on the availability of informal care and the affordability of formal long-term care. This paper investigates how the demand for and provision of informal care cha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

ICT and education: evidence from student home addresses

Governments are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper presents a new strategy to estimate the causal ef...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization: a woman's best friend? Exporters and the gender wage gap

While the impact of globalization on income inequality has received a lot of attention, little is known about its effect on the gender wage gap (GWG). This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the GWG be...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The persistence of local joblessness

Local differences in US employment-population ratios and unemployment rates have persisted over many decades. Using decennial census data from 1950-2010, we investigate the reasons for this. The persistence cannot be exp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do more of those in misery suffer from poverty, unemployment or mental illness?

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The changing returns to crime: do criminals respond to prices?

In economic models of crime individuals respond to changes in the potential value of criminal opportunities. We analyse this issue by estimating crime-price elasticities from detailed data on criminal incidents in London...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firming up inequality

Earnings inequality in the United States has increased rapidly over the last three decades, but little is known about the role of firms in this trend. For example, how much of the rise in earnings inequality can be attri...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, trade and productivity in services: evidence from UK firms

This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of service-producing firms in the U.K. Immigrants may substitute for imported intermediate inputs (offshore production) and they may i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Universal pre-school education: The case of public funding with private provision

This paper studies the effect of free pre-school education on child outcomes in primary school. We exploit the staggered implementation of free part-time pre-school for three-year-olds across Local Education Authorities ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Retail globalization and household welfare: evidence from Mexico

The arrival of global retail chains in developing countries is causing a radical transformation in the way that households source their consumption. This paper draws on a new collection of Mexican microdata to estimate t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Ill communication: technology, distraction and student performance

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Space-time (in)consistency in the national accounts: causes and cures

In early 2014 the World Bank published the main findings of the 2011 International Comparison Program (ICP). The result was surprising: the world is apparently richer and more equal than we would have expected based on e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Large capital inflows, sectoral allocation and economic performance

This paper describes the stylized facts characterizing periods of exceptionally large capital inflows in a sample of 70 middle- and high-income countries over the last 35 years. We identify 155 episodes of large capital ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can helping the sick hurt the able? Incentives, information and disruption in a welfare reform

Disability rolls have escalated in developed nations over the last 40 years. The UK stands out because the numbers on these benefits stopped rising when a welfare reform (“Jobcentre Plus”) was introduced that integrated ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Has performance pay increased wage inequality in Britain?

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) we show performance pay (PP) increased earnings dispersion among men and women, and to a lesser extent among full-time working women, in the decade of economic gr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When pressure sinks performance: evidence from diving competitions

Tournaments are designed to enhance participants’ effort and productivity. However, ranking near the top may increase psychological pressure and reduce performance. We empirically study the impact of interim rank on perf...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The future of the German industrial relations model

The paper examines recent evidence on the erosion of the German industrial relations model. Although its coverage has declined, much of this has occurred in smaller and newer establishments, and compared with Britain, it...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is happiness a predictor of election results?

Is it in politicians’ interest to focus policy on subjective well-being (SWB)? Many governments and international organisations have recently begun to measure progress at least partly in terms of the population’s SWB or ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Integrated estimates of capital stocks and services for the United Kingdom: 1950-2013

This paper presents annual estimates of fixed capital stocks and capital services for the United Kingdom, 1950-2013, for the whole economy and for the market sector. Our estimates cover eight asset types (structures, mac...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Giving a little help to girls? Evidence on grade discrimination and its effect on students' achievement

This paper tests if gender-discrimination in grading affects pupils' achievements and course choices. I use a unique dataset containing grades given by teachers, scores obtained anonymously by pupils at different ages, a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

'High' achievers? Cannabis access and academic performance

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals’ n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do you have To win it to fix it? A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why are higher skilled workers more mobile geographically? The role of the job surplus

The skill gap in geographical mobility is entirely driven by workers who report moving for a new job. A natural explanation lies in the large expected surplus accruing to skilled job matches. Just as large surpluses ease...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Asymmetric industrial energy prices and international trade

This paper measures the response of bilateral trade flows to differences in industrial energy prices across countries. Using a panel for the period 1996-2011 including 42 countries, 62 sectors and covering 60% of global ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating the impact of Sunday trading deregulation

During the past few decades a number of European countries lifted the regulations that restricted the opening hours of shops on Sunday. In this paper we examine the impact of Sunday trade deregulation on employment, expe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Robots at work

Despite ubiquitous discussions of robots’ potential impact, there is almost no systematic empirical evidence on their economic effects. In this paper we analyze for the first time the economic impact of industrial robots...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The roles of import competition and export opportunities for technical change

A variety of empirical and theoretical trade papers have suggested and documented a positive impact of trade on the productivity of firms. However, there is less consensus about the underlying mechanism at work. While tr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of immigration on the local labor market outcomes of blue collar workers: panel data evidence

Using a large administrative French panel data set for 1976-2007, we examine how low- educated immigration affects the wages, employment, occupations and locations of blue-collar native workers. The natives in the sample...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teachers and performance pay in 2014: first results of a survey

From the autumn of 2014, a new performance pay scheme was introduced for school teachers in England and Wales. It makes pay progression for all teachers dependent upon their performance as evaluated by their line manager...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trust and racial income inequality: evidence from the U.S.

Existing studies of trust formation in U.S. metropolitan areas have found that trust is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racial fragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of incom...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rise of the machines: the effects of labor-saving innovations on jobs and wages

How do firms respond to technological advances that facilitate the automation of tasks? Which tasks will they automate, and what types of worker will be replaced as a result? We present a model that distinguishes between...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Share capitalism and worker wellbeing

We show that worker wellbeing is not only related to the amount of compensation workers receive but also how they receive it. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been pre-occupied with individual perf...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Schooling, nation building and industrialization: a Gellnerian approach

We model a two-region country where value is created through bilateral production between masses and elites (bourgeois and landowners). Industrialization requires the elites to finance schools and the masses to attend th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All-star or benchwarmer? Relative age, cohort size and career success in the NHL

We analyze the performance outcomes of National Hockey League (NHL) players over 18 seasons (1990-1991 to 2007-2008) as a function of the demographic conditions into which they were born. We have three main findings. Fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Voting behaviour and public employment in Nazi Germany

This paper analyses whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after their rise to power in 1933. Using data on public employment in the armed forces, public administrations and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Preferences for fair prices, cursed inferences, and the nonneutrality of money

This paper explains the nonneutrality of money from two assumptions: (1) consumers dislike paying prices that exceed some fair markup on firms’ marginal costs; and (2) consumers under infer marginal costs from available ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vertical transmission of overweight: evidence From English adoptees

We examine the vertical transmission of overweight drawing upon a sample of English children, both adopted and non-adopted, and their families. Our results suggest strong evidence of an intergenerational association of o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Violence and birth outcomes: evidence from homicides in Brazil

This paper uses microdata from Brazilian natality and mortality vital statistics between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence - measured by homicide rates - on birth outcomes. The e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Temporary Protection and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Napoleonic Blockade

This paper uses a natural experiment to assess whether temporary protection from trade with industrial leaders can foster development of infant industries in follower countries. Using a new dataset compiled from primary ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Making Do With Less: Working Harder During Recessions

Why did productivity rise during recent recessions? One possibility is that average worker quality increased. A second is that each incumbent worker produced more. The second effect is termed “making do with less.” Using...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

'American Idol' - 65 years of Admiration

Since the 1940s Gallup has, every December, asked Americans about the living man and woman they most admire. This paper documents the way in which the types of people who are admired has changed and argues that the respo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Value of Bosses

How and by how much do supervisors enhance worker productivity? Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, supervisor effects are estimated and found to be large. Replacing a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Financial Constraints in Search Equilibrium: Mortensen and Pissarides Meet Holmstrom and Tirole

The Great Recession has indicated that firms' leverage and access to finance are important for hiring and firing decisions. It is now empirically established that bank lending is correlated to employment losses when cred...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Landing The First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring

Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries - called outsourcing agencies - have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that age...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Adaptation to Poverty in Long-Run Panel Data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show first...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender Differences in Response to Big Stakes

It is commonly perceived that increasing incentives improves performance. However, the reaction to increased incentives might differ between men and women, leading to gender differences in performance. In a natural exper...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Women Earn Less Even as Social Entrepreneurs?

Based upon unique survey data collected using respondent driven sampling methods, we investigate whether there is a gender pay gap among social entrepreneurs in the UK. We find that women as social entrepreneurs earn 29%...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Management Matter In Schools?

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

It's Where You Work: Increases in Earnings Dispersion across Establishments and Individuals in the US

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Maximum Markup Regulation on Prices

Markup regulation is a common yet understudied type of regulation. We analyze the repeal of maximum wholesale and retail markup regulation in an oligopolistic and vertically non-integrated market. By comparing the prices...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Relaxing Credit Constraints in Emerging Economies: The Impact of Public Loans on the Performance of Brazilian Manufacturers

n emerging economies credit constraints are often perceived as one of the most important market frictions hampering firm innovation and productivity growth in manufacturing. Huge amounts of public money are devoted to th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Optimal Contracting and the Organization of Knowledge

We study contractual arrangements that support an efficient use of time in a knowledge-intensive economy in which agents endogenously specialize in either production or consulting. The resulting market for advice is plag...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employee Stock Purchase Plans - Gift or Incentive? Evidence from a Multinational Corporation

Many large listed firms offer workers the opportunity to buy shares in the firm at discounted rates through employee stock purchase plans (ESPP). The discounted rate creates a gift exchange, where the firm hopes that wor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic Growth Evens-Out Happiness: Evidence from Six Surveys

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern gro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

City of Dreams

Higher ability workers benefit more from bigger cities while housing costs there are higher for everyone, and yet there is little sorting on ability. A possible explanation is that young individuals have an imperfect ass...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Asymmetric Experience of Positive and Negative Economic Growth: Global Evidence Using Subjective Well-Being Data

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? Using subjective well-being data, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth is experienced. We find that mea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

From Selling Goods to Selling Services: Firm Responses to Trade Liberalization

In the face of trade liberalization domestic firms are often forced out of the market, whereas others adapt and survive. In this paper we focus on a new channel of adaptation, namely the shift toward increased provision ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Assessing the Effect of School Days and Absences on Test Score Performance

While instructional time is viewed as crucial to learning, little is known about the effectiveness of reducing absences relative to increasing the number of school days. In this regard, this paper jointly estimates the e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

European Integration and the Gains from Trade

This chapter discusses whether and how .new quantitative trade models.(NQTMs) can be fruitfully applied to quantify the welfare effects of trade liberalization, thus shedding light on the trade-related effects of further...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge Spillovers from Clean and Dirty Technologies

How much should governments subsidize the development of new clean technologies? We use patent citation data to investigate the relative intensity of knowledge spillovers in clean and dirty technologies in two technologi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Paying Out and Crowding Out? The Globalisation of Higher Education

We investigate the rapid influx of overseas students into UK higher education and the impact on the number of domestic students. Using administrative data since 1994/5, we find no evidence of crowd out of domestic underg...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Patents and the Global Diffusion of New Drugs

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Education and Health Knowledge: Evidence from UK Compulsory Schooling Reforms

We investigate if there is a causal link between education and health knowledge using data from the 1984/85 and 1991/92 waves of the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS). Uniquely, the survey asks respondents what they ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumer Search: Evidence from Path-tracking Data

We estimate the effect of consumer search on the price of the purchased product in a physical store environment. We implement the analysis using a unique data set obtained from radio frequency identification tags, which ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early, Late or Never? When Does Parental Education Impact Child Outcomes?

We study the intergenerational effects of parents’ education on their children’s educational outcomes. The endogeneity of parental education is addressed by exploiting the exogenous shift in education levels induced by t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What is 'Firm Heterogeneity' in Trade Models? The Role of Quality, Scope, Markups and Cost

We estimate a structural model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms to examine the sources of firm heterogeneity emphasized in the recent trade and macro literatures. Using Nielsen barcode data on prices and sales, we est...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Locus of Control and Its Intergenerational Implications for Early Childhood Skill Formation

We propose a model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on the early skill formation of their children. This subjective belief is determined in part by locus of control (LOC), i....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, Diversity and the Labour Market Outcomes of Native Workers: Some Recent Developments

This brief essay provides a selective discussion of how in recent years economists in the neoclassical tradition have addressed the questions whether and how immigration affects native workers’ labour market outcomes. In...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Benford's Law, Families of Distributions and a Test Basis

Benford's Law is used to test for data irregularities. While novel, there are two weaknesses in the current methodology. First, test values used in practice are too conservative and the test values of this paper are more...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Volatility of Earnings: Evidence from High-Frequency Firm-Level Data

The first contribution of this paper is to use UK monthly firm-level data to show that there is a large amount of transitory volatility in firm-level average earnings from month to month. We conclude that this cannot all...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Latin American Efficiency Gap

The average Latin American country produces about 1 fifth of the output per worker of the US. What are the sources of these enormous income gaps? I report development-accounting results for Latin America. On average Lati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic Selection: An Idea Flows Theory of Entry, Trade and Growth

This paper develops an idea flows theory of trade and growth with heterogeneous firms. New firms learn from incumbent firms, but the diffusion technology ensures entrants learn not only from frontier technologies, but fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gone for Good? Subsidies with Export Share Requirements in China: 2002-2013

This paper presents a simple model of subsidies with export share requirements (ESR) in a heterogeneous firm environment. A two-country general equilibrium version of the model with a single 100% ESR is calibrated using ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Because I'm Worth It: A Lab-Field Experiment on the Spillover Effects of Incentives in Health

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task – and then how...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reconciling Observed Tariffs and the Median Voter Model

Median voter theory applied to trade policy predicts positive tariffs in capital-abundant countries and negative tariffs in labor-abundant countries. Negative tariffs are rare, and this paper reconciles the median voter ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Crime Scars: Recessions and the Making of Career Criminals

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job match...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Happens When Employers are Free to Discriminate? Evidence from the English Barclays Premier Fantasy Football League

Research on employers’ hiring discrimination is limited by the unlawfulness of such activity. Consequently, researchers have focused on the intention to hire. Instead, we rely on a virtual labour market, the Fantasy Foot...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating a Decade of Mobile Termination Rate Regulation

We re-consider the impact that regulation of call termination on mobile phones has had on mobile customers’ bills. Using a large panel covering 27 countries, we find that the “waterbed” phenomenon, initially observed unt...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wealth Shocks and Health Outcomes: Evidence from Stock Market Fluctuations

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I sho...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fueling the Gender Gap? Oil and Women's Labor and Marriage Market Outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of resource-based economic specialization on women's labor market outcomes. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields in the Southern United States coupled with a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Biomarkers and Long-term Market Outcomes: The Case of Creatine

Using the Young Finns Study (YFS) combined with the Finnish Linked Employer-Employee Data (FLEED) we show that quantities of creatine measured in 1980 prior to labour market entry affect labour market outcomes over the p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fracking Growth

This paper estimates the effect of the shale oil and gas boom in the United States on local economic outcomes. The main source of exogenous variation to be explored is the location of previously unexplored shale deposits...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Transportation Costs and the Spatial Organization of Economic Activity

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multi-region model of economic geography that w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Transparency and Deliberation within the FOMC: A Computational Linguistics Approach

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational ling...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying Spillovers in Open Source Content Production: Evidence from Wikipedia

Using detailed edit-level data over eight years across a large number of articles on Wikipedia, we find evidence for a positive spillover effect in editing activity. Cumulative past contributions, embodied by the current...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Dynamics of Employment Growth: New Evidence from 18 Countries

Motivated by the on-going interest of policy makers in the sources of job creation, this paper presents results from a new OECD project on the dynamics of employment (DynEmp) based on an innovative methodology using firm...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

External Integration, Structural Transformation and Economic Development: Evidence From Argentina

This paper uses the natural experiment of Argentina’s integration into world markets in the late-nineteenth century to provide evidence on the role of internal geography in shaping the effects of external integration. We...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are Firms Paying More For Performance?

Despite its potential to raise productivity, performance-related-pay (PRP) is not widespread in market-oriented economies. Furthermore, despite secular changes conducive to its take-up, there is mixed evidence as to whet...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Not So Dissatisfied After All? The Impact of Union Coverage on Job Satisfaction

The links between unionisation and job satisfaction remain controversial. In keeping with the existing literature we find strong statistically significant negative correlations between unionisation and overall job satisf...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Eliciting Taxpayer Preferences Increases Tax Compliance

Two experiments show that eliciting taxpayer preferences on government spending—providing taxpayer agency--increases tax compliance. We first create an income and taxation environment in a laboratory setting to test for ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Winners and Losers from a Commodities-for-Manufactures Trade Boom

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winne...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Foreign Direct Investment and Domestic Entrepreneurship: Blessing or Curse?

This paper explores the effects of foreign direct investment, measured by mergers and acquisitions, on domestic entrepreneurial entry. We use a micro-panel of more than two thousand individuals disaggregated by industry ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Can Life Satisfaction Data Tell Us About Discrimination Against Sexual Minorities? A Structural Equation Model for Australia and the United Kingdom

Very little is known about how the differential treatment of sexual minorities could influence subjective reports of overall well-being. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Data from two large surveys that provide nationa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and Uncertainty

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the uncertainty shock idea of Bloom (2009) with a model of international trade, extending the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Video Killed the Radio Star? Online Music Videos and Digital Music Sales

Sampling poses an interesting problem in markets with experience goods. Free samples reveal product quality and help consumers to make informed purchase decisions (promotional effect). However, sampling may also induce c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration and the Access to Social Housing in the UK

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the probability of being in social housing in the UK. In recent years immigrant households are slightly more likely than natives to be in social housing but once one c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Political Competition and the Limits of Political Compromise

We consider an economy where competing political parties alternate in office. Due to rent-seeking motives, incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimum level. Parties cannot commit t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Mandatory Entitlement to Paid Leave on Employment in the UK

I evaluate the impact of the UK Working Time Regulations 1998, which introduced mandatory paid holiday entitlement. The regulation gave (nearly) all workers the right to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid holiday per a year. W...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trapped Factors and China's Impact on Global Growth

When China’s accession to the WTO exposed European firms to import competition, they responded by increasing their investment in innovation. This response was stronger in industries and firms where factors of production ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Home Computers and Married Women's Labor Supply

I consider how the availability of a personal computer at home changed employment for married women. I develop a theoretical model that motivates the empirical specifications. Using data from the U.S. CPS from 1984 to 20...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Political Economy of Inclusive Rural Growth

Abstract Commentators on the `East Asian Miracle' of inclusive growth have often pointed toward shared rural growth policies. But why were these policies not chosen elsewhere? This paper models voters who invest in eithe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

IT and Management in America

The Census Bureau recently conducted a survey of management practices in over 30,000 plants across the US, the first large-scale survey of management in America. Analyzing these data reveals several striking results. Fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When Work Disappears: Racial Prejudice and Recession Labour Market Penalties

This paper assesses whether racial prejudice and labour market discrimination is counter-cyclical. This may occur if prejudice and discrimination are partly driven by competition over scarce resources, which intensifies ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic Uncertainty, Parental Selection, and the Criminal Activity of the 'Children of the Wall'

We study the link between parental selection and children criminality in a new context. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertai...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Looking Ahead: Subjective Time Perception and Individual Time Discounting

Time discounting is at the heart of economic decision-making. We disentangle hyperbolic discounting from subjective time perception using experimental data from incentive-compatible tests to measure time preferences, and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Missing gains from trade?

The theoretical result that there are welfare gains from trade is a central tenet of international economics. In a class of trade models that satisfy a 'gravity equation,' the welfare gains from trade can be computed usi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Childhood Sporting Activities and Adult Labour-Market Outcomes

We here ask whether sports participation at school is positively correlated with adult labour-market outcomes. There are many potential channels for this effect, although, as usual, identifying a causal relationship is d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Upward Social Mobility, Well-being and Political Preferences: Evidence from the BHPS

The paper uses 18 waves of BHPS data to provide evidence of the roles of both own social status and upward mobility relative to one's parents on job and life satisfaction, preferences for redistribution, pro-public secto...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Flex Cars and Competition in Ethanol and Gasoline Retail Markets

In Brazil, gasoline and ethanol coexist as automotive fuels and are becoming closer substitutes as flex cars become more widely adopted. We employ this source of variation in a large panel of weekly prices at the station...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and com...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Transmission of Monetary Policy Operations through Redistributions and Durable Purchases

A large literature has documented statistically significant effects of monetary policy on economic activity. The central explanation for how monetary policy transmits to the real economy relies critically on nominal rigi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavourable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

An Urban Legend?! Power Rationing, Fertility and its Effects on Mothers

This paper answers the question whether extreme power rationing can induce changes in human fertility and thus, generate “mini baby booms”. We study a period of extensive power rationing in Colombia that lasted for most ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Decoupling of Wage Growth and Productivity Growth? Myth and Reality

It is widely believed that in the US wage growth has fallen massively behind productivity growth. Recently, it has also been suggested that the UK is starting to follow the same path. Analysts point to the much faster gr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Predicts a Successful Life? A Life-Course Model of Well-Being

If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade Integration, Market Size and Industrialization: Evidence from China's National Trunk Highway System

Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Uncertainty Reduce Growth? Using Disasters as Natural Experiments

A growing body of evidence suggests that uncertainty is counter cyclical, rising sharply in recessions and falling in booms. But what is the causal relationship between uncertainty and growth? To identify this we constru...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational Persistence in Income and Social Class: The Impact of Within-Group Inequality

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons’ earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Importance of Rank Position

We find an individual’s rank within their reference group has effects on later objective outcomes. To evaluate the impact of local rank, we use a large administrative dataset tracking over two million students in England...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Risk and Evidence of Bias in Randomized Controlled Trials in Economics

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) has been a heavily utilized research tool in medicine for over 60 years. Since the early 2000’s, large-scale RCTs have been used in increasingly large numbers in the social sciences ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mental Illness and Unhappiness

This paper is a contribution to the second World Happiness Report. It makes five main points: 1. Mental health is the biggest single predictor of life-satisfaction. This is so in the UK, Germany and Australia even if men...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Crime and Immigration: New Evidence from England and Wales

We study a high profile public policy question on immigration, namely the link between crime and immigration, presenting new evidence from England and Wales in the 2000s. For studying immigration impacts, this period is ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Does it Pay?

We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between “entrepreneurs” and other business owners. The incorporated self-employed have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncogniti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being

The aim of this paper is to survey the 'hard' evidence on the effects of subjective well-being. In doing so, we complement the evidence on the determinants of well-being by showing that human well-being also affects outc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Model of Aggregate Demand and Unemployment

We present a static model of aggregate demand and unemployment. The economy has a nonproduced good, a produced good, and labor. Product and labor markets have matching frictions. A general equilibrium is a set of prices,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Buyer Margins of Firms' Exports

We use detailed data on exporters from Costa Rica, Ecuador and Uruguay as well as on their buyers to show that aggregate exports are disproportionally driven by few multi-buyers exporters whose foreign sales of any produ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A General Method for Valuing Non-Market Goods Using Wellbeing Data: Three-Stage Wellbeing Valuation

Subjective wellbeing data is becoming increasingly popular in economics research. The wellbeing valuation approach uses wellbeing data instead of data gleaned from preferences to attach monetary values to non-market good...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Regional Growth and Regional Decline

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are Happier People Less Judgmental of Other People's Selfish Behaviors? Laboratory Evidence from Trust and Gift Exchange Games

What determines people’s moral judgments of selfish behaviors? Here we study whether people’s normative views in trust and gift exchange games, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance, are them...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment and Domestic Violence: Theory and Evidence

Is unemployment the overwhelming determinant of domestic violence that many commentators expect it to be? The contribution of this paper is to examine, theoretically and empirically, how changes in unemployment affect th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unmet Aspirations as an Explanation for the Age U-Shape in Human Wellbeing

A large literature in behavioral and social sciences has found that human wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midli...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Winning Big But Feeling No Better? The Effect of Lottery Prizes on Physical and Mental Health

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking)...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Enhancing Recovery Rates: Lessons from Year One of the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Programme

Background: The English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative aims to make evidence-based psychological therapies for depression and anxiety disorder more widely available in the National Health S...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Effects of Resources Across School Phases: A Summary of Recent Evidence

This report provides an overview and discussion of the past decade of academic evidence on the causal effects of resources in schooling on students’ outcomes. Early evidence lacked good strategies for estimating the effe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Molecular Genetics and Subjective Well-Being

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a major topic of research across the social sciences. Twin and family studies have found that genetic factors may account for as much as 30-40% of the variance in SWB. Here, we study geneti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Affirmative Action and University Fit: Evidence from Proposition 209

Proposition 209 banned the use of racial preferences in admissions at public colleges in California. We analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system before and afte...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

University Differences in the Graduation of Minorities in STEM Fields: Evidence from California

The low number of college graduates with science degrees - particularly among underrepresented minorities - is of growing concern. We examine differences across universities in graduating students in different fields. Us...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neighbors, Knowledge, and Nuggets: Two Natural Field Experiments on the Role of Incentives on Energy Conservation

There is increasing research on the exogenous impact of descriptive social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Question of Degree: The Effects of Degree Class on Labor Market Outcomes

How does measured performance at university affect labor market outcomes? We show that degree class - a coarse measure of student performance used in the UK - causally affects graduates' industry and hence expected wages...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Explaining cross-racial differences in the educational gender gap

The sizable gender gap in college enrolment, especially among African Americans, constitutes a puzzling empirical regularity that may have serious consequences on marriage markets, male labor force participation and the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Racial Segregation Patterns in Selective Universities

This paper examines sorting into interracial friendships at selective universities. We show significant friendship segregation, particularly for blacks. Indeed, black friendships are no more diverse in college than in hi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pushing On a String: US Monetary Policy is Less Powerful in Recessions

We estimate the impulse response of key US macro series to the monetary policy shocks identified by Romer and Romer (2004), allowing the response to depend flexibly on the state of the business cycle. We find strong evid...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Financial Resource Curse

This paper presents a model of financial resource curse, i.e. episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth. We study a two-sector, tradable and non-tradable, small open economy. Th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation, Reallocation and Growth

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A key feature is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Has Job Polarization Squeezed the Middle Class? Evidence from the Allocation of Talents

Over the last two decades, earnings in the United States increased at the top and at the bottom of the wage distribution but not in the middle - the intensely debated middle class squeeze. At the same time there was a su...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Marginal Income Effect of Education on Happiness: Estimating the Direct and Indirect Effects of Compulsory Schooling on Well-Being in Australia

Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall well-being of citizens. However, little is known about the causal pathways through which education shap...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mental Health: The New Frontier for Labour Economics

This lecture argues that mental health is a major factor of production. It is the biggest single influence on life satisfaction, with mental health eight years earlier a more powerful explanatory factor than current inco...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Geography of Inter-State Resource Wars

We establish a theoretical as well as empirical framework to assess the role of resource endowments and their geographic location for inter-State conflict. The main predictions of the theory are that conflict tends to be...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating Bayesian Decision Problems with Heterogeneous Priors

In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment in the Great Recession

This paper studies the responses of unemployment in Germany, the United States and Britain to the Great Recession of 2008-09 by making use of Beveridge curve analysis, and in the entire OECD with other techniques. It is ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Debt and Incomplete Financial Markets: A Case for Nominal GDP Targeting

Financial markets are incomplete, thus for many agents borrowing is possible only by accepting a financial contract that specifies a fixed repayment. However, the future income that will repay this debt is uncertain, so ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Decision–Making and Implementation in Teams

We use a mechanism–design approach to study a team whose members choose a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Informatio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Concentration Versus Re-Matching? Evidence About the Locational Effects of Commuting Costs

Using administrative employer-employee data from Germany, I exploit two reductions of tax breaks for commuting in 2003/4 and 2006/7 to estimate commuting costs’ effect on the decision to switch job and move house. Standa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Monopolistic Competition and Optimum Product Selection: Why and How Heterogeneity Matters

After some decades of relative oblivion, the interest in the optimality properties of monopolistic competition has recently re-emerged due to the availability of an appropriate and parsimonious framework to deal with fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Patents and Cumulative Innovation: Causal Evidence from the Courts

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender Gaps and the Rise of the Service Economy

This paper explains the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and market hours in recent decades by the growth of the service economy. We propose a model with three sectors: goods, services and home production. Women have a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Relational Knowledge Transfers

An expert must train a novice. The novice initially has no cash, so he can only pay the expert with the accumulated surplus from his production. At any time, the novice can leave the relationship with his acquired knowle...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Smoking, Income and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Smoking Bans

This paper investigates the effects of local smoking bans on different outcomes using county and time variation over the last 20 years in the US. First, I find no evidence that local smoking bans in bars, restaurants and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Surprisingly Dire Situation of Children's Education in Rural West Africa: Results from the CREO Study in Guinea-Bissau

We conducted a survey covering 20% of villages with 200-1000 population in rural Guinea-Bissau. We interviewed household heads, care-givers of children, and their teachers and schools. We analysed results from 9,947 chil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm Heterogeneity and Aggregate Welfare

We examine how firm heterogeneity influences aggregate welfare through endogenous firm selection. We consider a homogeneous firm model that is a special case of a heterogeneous firm model with a degenerate productivity d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Outsourcing and the Rise in Services

This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1948-2002. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Great Stagnation: What Can Policymakers Do?

Although the economic recovery in the UK has been disappointing, it is inappropriate to either assert that Japan’s two lost decades illustrate the ineffectiveness of stimulative monetary policy or that the UK is predesti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fast-Tracking 'Green' Patent Applications: An Empirical Analysis

This paper presents the first empirical analysis of programmes to fast-track ‘green’ patent applications in place in seven Intellectual Property offices around the world. We find that only a small share of green patent a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US

This paper analyses how neighbors' income affect agents' well-being using unprecedented data from the BRFSS and the City of Somerville. We conduct a multi-scale approach at the county, ZIP code and street-levels and find...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Really Uncertain Business Cycles

We propose uncertainty shocks as a new shock that drives business cycles. First, we demonstrate that microeconomic uncertainty is robustly countercyclical, rising sharply during recessions, particularly during the Great ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment

About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese tra...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What are the Channels for Technology Sourcing? Panel Data Evidence from German Companies

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effective...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO Incentive Contracts in China: Why Does City Location Matter?

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When the Cat is Near, the Mice Won't Play: The Effect of External Examiners in Italian Schools

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Moving Up and Sliding Down: An Empirical Assessment of the Effect of Social Mobility on Subjective Wellbeing

Many people remain in the same income group as their parents and this is a cause of much discussion and some concern. In this work, we examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using the B...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Trapped Factors Model of Innovation

When will reducing trade barriers against a low wage country cause innovation to increase in high wage regions like the US or EU? We develop a model where factors of production have costs of adjustment and so are partial...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Survive Another Day: Using Changes in the Composition of Investments to Measure the Cost of Credit Constraints

We introduce a novel empirical strategy to measure credit shocks. Theoretically, we show that credit shocks reduce the value of long term investments relative to short term ones. Under the (conservative) assumption that ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are You Happy While You Work?

Recent work in psychology and economics has investigated ways in which individuals experience their lives. This literature includes influences on individuals’ momentary happiness. We contribute to this literature using a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Task Specialization in U.S. Cities from 1880-2000

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro-data from t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Long and Short-Term Effects of the Financial Crisis on Labour Productivity, Capital and Output

The behaviour of labour productivity in the United Kingdom since the onset of the recession in early 2008 constitutes a puzzle. Over four years after the recession began labour productivity is still below its previous pe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Free Trade Aggreements and the Consolidation of Democracy

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Heterogeneous Firms and Trade

This paper reviews the new approach to international trade based on firm heterogeneity in differentiated product markets. This approach explains a variety of features exhibited in disaggregated trade data, including the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

China's Pure Exporter Subsidies

One third of Chinese exporters sell more than ninety percent of their production abroad. We argue that this distinctive pattern is attributable to a wide range of subsidies that provide incentives to these “pure exporter...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity As If Space Mattered: An Application to Factor Markets Across China

Optimal production decisions depend on local market characteristics. This paper develops a model to explain firm labor demand and firm density across regions. Firms vary in their technology to combine imperfectly substit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pride and Prejudice: Using Ethnic-Sounding Names and Inter-Ethnic Marriages to Identify Labor Market Discrimination

We use non-random sorting into interethnic marriage and salient differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi surnames to evaluate the causal impact of Sephardic affiliation on wages. Using the 1995 Israeli Census, we esti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Free to Choose? Reform and Demand Response in the English National Health Service

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Carbon taxes, path dependency and directed technical change: evidence from the auto industry

Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between “dirty” (internal combustion engine) and “clean” (e.g. electric an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Minimum Wages and Wage Inequality: Some Theory and an Application to the UK

Research suggests that, at the levels set in countries like the US and the UK, minimum wages have little effect on employment but do have impacts on wage inequality. However we lack models that can explain these facts – ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating the Influence of Life Satisfaction and Positive Affect on Later Income Using Sibling Fixed-Effects

The question of whether there is a connection between income and psychological well-being is a long-studied issue across the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences. Much research has found that richer people tend...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Enduring Impact of Childhood Experience on Mental Health: Evidence Using Instrumented Co-Twin Data

The question of whether there is a lasting effect of childhood experience on mental health has eluded causal measurement. We draw upon identical twin data and econometric instrumentation to provide an unbiased answer. We...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Selection Effects with Heterogeneous Firms

We provide a general characterization of which firms will select alternative ways of serving a market. If and only if firms' maximum profits are supermodular in production and marketaccess costs, more efficient firms wil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Resilience to Economic Shocks and the Long Reach of Childhood Bullying

This paper investigates whether people’s ability to withstand and adapt to one of the most important economic shocks – job loss – is determined early on in childhood. Using nationally representative longitudinal data tha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Optimal Policy for Macro-Financial Stability

In this paper we study whether policy makers should wait to intervene until a financial crisis strikes or rather act in a preemptive manner. We study this question in a relatively simple dynamic stochastic general equili...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Careers of Immigrants

I use a unique linked employer employee panel covering all wage earners in the private sector in Portugal to shed new light on the careers of immigrants. During the first ten years in the country immigrants close one thi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Policy Design in a Model with Swings in Risk Appetite

This paper studies the policy implications of habits and cyclical changes in agents' appetite for risk-taking. To do so, it analyses the non-linear solution of a New Keynesian (NK) model, in which slow-moving habits help...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exporters, Importers and Credit Constraints

This paper analyses the interaction between credit constraints and trading behaviour. I construct a unique dataset containing firm-level trade transactions data, balance sheets and credit scores from an independent credi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Technology Diffusion and Learning On-the-job

This paper develops a theory of technology transfer when technology is embodied in human capital and learning requires on-the-job communication between managers and workers. Patterns of knowledge diffusion depend on wher...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Reply

This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Musn't Grumble. Immigration, Health and Health Service Use in the UK and Germany

A rise in population caused by increased immigration, is sometimes accompanied by concerns that the increase in population puts additional or differential pressure on welfare services which might affect the net fiscal co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Transferable Scars: A Longitudinal Evidence of Psychological Impact of Past Parental Unemployment on Adolescents in the United Kingdom

Using a longitudinal data of British youths, this paper explores the consequences of past parental unemployment on the current happiness and self-esteem of the children. We find that a past unemployment spell of the fath...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the Measurement of Trade Costs: Direct vs. Indirect Approaches to Quantifying Standards and Technical Regulations

In this article, we review the literature on the measurement of trade costs in international trade with a special emphasis on nontariff measures and in particular on standards and technical regulations. We distinguish ‘d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Cautionary Note on Using Industry Affiliation to Predict Income

Many literatures investigate the causal impact of income on economic outcomes, for example in the context of intergenerational transmission or well-being and health. Some studies have proposed to use employer wage differ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is the International Border Effect Larger than the Domestic Border Effect? Evidence from U.S. Trade

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a u...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reserve Accumulation, Growth and Financial Crises

We present a model that reproduces two salient facts characterizing the international monetary system: i) Faster growing countries are associated with lower net capital inflows and ii) Countries that grow faster accumula...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Capital Controls or Exchange Rate Policy? A Pecuniary Externality Perspective

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a new policy paradigm has emerged in which old-fashioned policies such as capital controls and other government distortions have become part of the standard policy toolkit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happy Talk: mode of administration effects on subjective well-being

Research on the measurement of subjective well-being (SWB) has escalated in recent years. This study contributes to the literature by examining how SWB reports differ by mode of survey administration. Using data from the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Steady-State Equilibrium in a Model of Short-Term Wage-Posting

This paper takes the canonical Burdett-Mortensen model of wage- posting and relaxes the assumption that wages are set once-for-all, instead assuming they can only be committed one period at a time. It derives a closed-fo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Not all Incentives Wash out the Warm Glow: The Case of Blood Donation Revisited

The issue of the nature of the altruism inherent in blood donation and the perverse effects of financial rewards for blood and/or organ donation has been recently revisited in the economic literature with limited consens...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Female Employment and Fertility - The Effects of Rising Female Wages

Increases in female employment and falling fertility rates have often been linked to rising female wages. However, over the last 30 years the US total fertility rate has been fairly stable while female wages have continu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The German Transfer Problem, 1920-1933: A Sovereign Debt Perspective

The severity of the Great Depression in Germany has sometimes been blamed on reparations in simplistic fashion. Alternative interpretations relied on American capital exports, the demise of the Gold Standard, or on malfu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Do People Pay for Useless Advice?

We investigated experimentally whether people can be induced to believe in a non-existent expert, and subsequently pay for what can only be described as transparently useless advice about future chance events. Consistent...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Selection into Trade and Wage Inequality

This paper analyzes the impact of trade integration on wage inequality when there is heterogeneity across both workers and firms. By incorporating labor assignment into the heterogeneous firms literature I develop a mode...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Human Capital, Matching and Job Satisfaction

Using a model of wage determination developed by Stevens (2003) we offer an explanation of why tenure has a negative effect when entered in job satisfaction equations. If job satisfaction measures match quality, then the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industry Compensation Under Relocation Risk: A Firm-Level Analysis of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme

When industry compensation is offered to prevent relocation of regulated firms, efficiency requires that payments be distributed across firms so as to equalize marginal relocation probabilities, weighted by the damage ca...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reparations, Deficits, and Debt Default: the Great Depression in Germany

Germany’s Great Depression of the early 1930s started in 1929 with a sudden stop in the current account. It ended after a foreign debt default that unfolded in several stages from 1931 to 1933. This chapter reviews Germa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The CEO Labour Market in China's Public Listed Companies

Using panel data for all of China’s public listed firms over the period 2001-2010 we examine how firms have recruited and rewarded their executives over a decade of huge growth and turbulence. CEO pay is sensitive to fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs

How do offshoring and immigration affect the employment of native workers? What kinds of jobs suffer, or benefit, most from the competition created by offshore and immigrant workers? In contrast to the existing literatur...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market Size, Competition, and the Product Mix of Exporters

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how competition across market destinations affects both a firm's exported product range and product mix. We show how tougher competition in an export ma...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Do CEOs Do?

We develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs’ time use. The idea - sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up - is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm’s pr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives

We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources and survey data to study the match between firms and managers. The data includes manager characteristics, such as risk aversion and talent; firm characteristics, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Allocation of Talent over the Business Cycle and its Effect on Sectoral Productivity

It is well documented that graduates enter different occupations in recessions than in booms. In this article, we examine the impact of this reallocation for long-term productivity and output across sectors. We develop a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Heterogeneity, Demand for Insurance and Adverse Selection

Recent empirical work finds that surprisingly little variation in the demand for insurance is explained by heterogeneity in risks. I distinguish between heterogeneity in risk preferences and risk perceptions underlying t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Environmental Policy and Directed Technological Change: Evidence from the European Carbon Market

This paper investigates the impact of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) on technological change. We exploit installations-level inclusion criteria to estimate the impact of the EU ETS on firms patenting. We find t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Goods Trade, Factor Mobility and Welfare

This paper extends a recent class of quantitative models of international trade to incorporate factor mobility within countries. We present a model-based decomposition of the variance of economic activity into the contri...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Span of Control and Span of Activity

For both practitioners and researchers, span of control plays an important role in defining and understanding the role of the CEO. In this paper, we combine organizational chart information for a sample of 65 companies w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and Inequality: From Theory to Estimation

While neoclassical theory emphasizes the impact of trade on wage inequality between occupations and sectors, more recent theories of firm heterogeneity point to the impact of trade on wage dispersion within occupations a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intermediaries in International Trade: Direct Versus Indirect Modes of Export

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different produc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike other high-skilled professions, the legal profession assesses performance using transparent measures tha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO Bonding: Who Posts Performance Bonds and Why?

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal-agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. Usin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Are Migrants Paid More?

In efficient global labour markets for very high wage workers one might expect wage differentials between migrant and domestic workers to reflect differences in labour productivity. However, using panel data on worker-fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incentives for Quality over Time - The Case of Facebook Applications

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engag...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cyclical Risk Aversion, Precautionary Saving and Monetary Policy

This paper analyzes the conduct of monetary policy in an environment in which cyclical swings in risk appetite affect households' propensity to save. It uses a New-Keynesian model featuring external habit formation to sh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global Value Chains During the Great Trade Collapse: A Bullwhip Effect?

This paper analyzes the performance of global value chains during the trade collapse. To do so, it exploits a unique transaction-level dataset on French firms containing information on cross-border monthly transactions m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Integration on Productivity and Welfare Distortions Under Monopolistic Competition

A fundamental question in monopolistic competition theory is whether the market allocates resources efficiently. This paper generalizes the Spence-Dixit-Stiglitz framework to heterogeneous firms, addressing when the mark...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Agglomeration, Trade and Selection

This paper studies how firm heterogeneity in terms of productivity affects the balance between agglomeration and dispersion forces in the presence of pecuniary externalities through a selection model of monopolistic comp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Genes, Economics and Happiness

A major finding from research into the sources of subjective well-being is that individuals exhibit a “baseline” level of happiness. We explore the influence of genetic variation by employing a twin design and genetic as...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happiness as a Driver of Risk-Avoiding Behavior

Most governments try to discourage their citizens from taking extreme risks with their health and lives. Yet, for reasons not understood, many people continue to do so. We suggest a new approach to this longstanding ques...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Competition Improve Public Hospitals' Efficiency? Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in the English National Health Service

This paper uses a difference-in-difference style estimation strategy to test separately the impact of competition from public sector and private sector hospitals on the efficiency of public hospitals. Our identification ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market Leadership Through Technology - Backward Compatibility in the U.S. Handheld Video Game Industry

The introduction of a new product generation forces incumbents in network industries to rebuild their installed base to maintain an advantage over potential entrants. We study if backward compatibility moderates this pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Model of Equilibrium Institutions

Institutions that serve the interests of an elite are often cited as an important reason for poor economic performance. This paper builds a model of institutions that allocate resources and power to maximize the payoff o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Signalling, Incumbency Advantage, and Optimal Reelection Rules

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are impor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Has China Grown So Fast? The Role of International Technology Transfer

Chinese economic growth has been spectacular in the last 30 years. We investigate the role of International Joint Ventures with Technology Transfer agreements, an understudied area. Technology transfer is the traditional...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Household Effects of Government Spending

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Determinants of Intrafirm Trade: Evidence from French Firms

How well does the theory of the firm explain the choice between intrafirm and arms' length trade? This paper uses firm-level import data from France to look into this question. We find support for three key predictions o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Institutions and Export Dynamics

We study the role of contract enforcement in shaping the dynamics of international trade at the firm level. We develop a theoretical model to describe how agents build reputations to overcome the problems created by weak...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Preferential Trade Agreements and the Labor Market

Labor market consequences are at the forefront of most debates on the merits of trade liberalization. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the primary form of trade liberalization in most countries, and sever...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Provision of Relative Performance Feedback Information: An Experimental Analysis of Performance and Happiness

This paper studies the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on individuals’ performance and affective response, under both piece-rate and flat-rate incentives. In a laboratory setup, agents perfo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fiscal Multipliers over the Business Cycle

This paper illustrates why fiscal policy becomes more effective as unemployment rises in recessions. The theory is based on the equilibrium unemployment model of Michaillat (forthcoming), in which jobs are rationed in re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gravity Redux: Measuring International Trade Costs with Panel Data

Barriers to international trade are known to be large but due to data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem I derive a micro-founded meas...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Some Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy

Business support policies designed to raise employment and productivity are ubiquitous around the world. We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to support manufacturing jobs thro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Paying for Performance: Incentive Pay Schemes and Employees' Financial Participation

We present new comparable data on the incidence of performance pay schemes in Europe and the USA. We find that the percentage of employees exposed to incentive pay schemes ranges from around 10-15 percent in some Europea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Left, Right, Left: Income and Political Dynamics in Transition Economies

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upwar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Assimilation in Multilingual Cities

Using the Public Use Microdata Files of the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Censuses, we study the determinants of the assimilation of language minorities into the city majority language. We show that official minority members (i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management Practices Across Firms and Countries

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing A...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Frictions

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We deve...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Service Trade and Occupational Tasks: An Empirical Investigation

Using micro data for Belgium we investigate the relationship between occupational tasks changes and the rise of service trade. We focus the analysis on the extensive margin and look at the heterogeneous proliferation of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Cash Transfers Improve Birth Outcomes? Evidence from Matched Vital Statistics, Social Security and Program Data

There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children’s birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statisti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Assignment Reversals: Trade, Skill Allocation and Wage Inequality

Understanding the allocation of skilled labor across industries is necessary to explain inter-industry wage differences and the effect of trade on wages. This paper develops a multi-sector assignment model with both hete...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigrant Enclaves and Crime

There is conflicting evidence on the consequences of immigrant neighbourhood segregation for individual outcomes, with various studies finding positive, negative or insubstantial effects. In this paper, we document the e...Read more...