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Discussion papers

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

Low-key photograph of a judge's gavel by Tingey Injury Law Firm via Unsplash.com
Youth crime and delinquency in and out of school

When secondary schools in England are closed, youth crime increases, highlighting the protective role that schools can play.
Photograph of Dover port by Bernd Dittrich via Unsplash.com
Deep integration and trade: UK firms in the wake of Brexit

New research finds that Brexit caused a sharp trade drop, especially for small firms, cutting UK exports by 6.4% and imports by 3.1%.

Latest Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper
Estimating labour market power: the long and short of it

This paper combines two empirical traditions in the study of employer monopsony power. One tradition estimates static firm labour supply elasticities, while the other focuses on labour market flows, estimating separation...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier and Alan Manning

10 June 2025

CEP discussion paper
Public sector performance disclosure: salary and career outcomes for top managers and employees

Public sector organizations around the world are held to account on the basis of objective measures of performance. This paper investigates, for the first time, the impact of subjective school inspection ratings on labor...Read more...

Iftikhar Hussain, Vincenzo Scrutinio and Shqiponja Telhaj

10 June 2025

CEP discussion paper
The value of a park in crises: Quantifying the health and wellbeing benefits of green spaces using exogenous variations in use values

Most people consider parks important for their quality of life, yet systematic causal evidence is missing. We exploit exogenous variations in their use values to estimate causal effects. Using a representative household ...Read more...

Jan Goebel, Christian Krekel and Katrin Rehdanz

2 June 2025

CEP discussion paper
Shocked by COVID: Exporting along global value chains

This paper examines the impact of protectionist policies on exports within global value chains (GVCs), using the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment. Leveraging UK customs data (2017-2020) and a shift-share identif...Read more...

Holger Breinlich, Jun Du and Oleksandr Shepotylo

20 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
Meaning at work

We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "D...Read more...

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales

14 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
The 2025 trade war: Dynamic impacts across US States and the global economy

We use a dynamic trade and reallocation model with downward nominal wage rigidities to quantitatively assess the economic consequences of the recent increase in the U.S. tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China,...Read more...

Andres Rodriguez-Clare, Mauricio Ulate and Jose P Vasquez

8 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
Management and firm dynamism

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and improve the performan...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen

6 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
Economics of greenfield urban planning

Urban planning has shaped cities for millennia, demarcating property rights and mitigating coordination failures, but its rigidities often conflict with market-driven development, which reflects preferences. Although pla...Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson, Francisco Libano-Monteiro, Martina Manara, Guy Michaels and Tanner Regan

6 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
Willingness to pay for workplace amenities

We develop a revealed preference approach to measure the value of workplace amenities by analyzing how variation in non-wage job attributes affects excess mass in the earnings distribution at budget discontinuities. The ...Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

6 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
Personnel is policy (implementation): Bureaucrats and the Korean export miracle

How much does the effect of industrial policy depend on the capacity of the bureaucrats implementing it? We exploit the rotation schedule of managers of South Korea's export promotion offices in 87 countries between 1965...Read more...

Philipp Barteska and Jay Euijung Lee

6 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
The US-China trade war creates jobs (elsewhere)

We examine the indirect effects of the US-China trade war on Brazil's labor market. Using industry-specific tariff changes and the sectoral employment distribution across local labor markets, we construct a measure of re...Read more...

Tiago Cavalcanti, Pedro Molina Ogeda and Emanuel Ornelas

2 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
The global effects of carbon border adjustment mechanisms

We study carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) policies, as currently being implemented by the EU and UK. Policy discussions have cited three motivations and one concern. CBAMs can improve domestic competitiveness in...Read more...

Kimberly Clausing, Jonathan Colmer, Allan Hsiao and Catherine Wolfram

2 May 2025

CEP discussion paper
Minimum wages and low wage workers: Compliance as non-employment margin

This paper examines the impact of a substantial minimum wage increase in Uruguay - a middle-income developing economy - on wages and employment. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences approach, we anal...Read more...

Nicolas Gonzalez-Pampillon and Javier Vazquez-Grenno

29 April 2025

CEP discussion paper
Creative destruction through innovation bursts

In theories of creative destruction, product innovation is a key driver of aggregate growth. In this paper, we confront the predictions of these theories about product dynamics with empirical patterns in product-level da...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Maarten De Ridder, Danial Lashkari and Davide Rigo

29 April 2025

CEP discussion paper
Dear brothers and sisters: Pope's speeches and the dynamics of conflict in Africa

Public speeches by leaders can serve as a cost-effective tool for fostering peace, yet their effectiveness remains uncertain, particularly in divided societies experiencing violent conflict. This paper examines the impac...Read more...

Mathieu Couttenier, Sophie Hatte, Lucile Laugerette and Tommaso Sonno

25 April 2025

CEP discussion paper
Firm-level technology adoption in times of crisis

We investigate the diffusion of frontier technologies across German firms before and during the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations behind technology investments, usi...Read more...

Melanie Arntz, Michael J. Bohm, Georg Graetz, Terry Gregory, Florian Lehmer and Cacilia Lipowski

16 April 2025

CEP discussion paper
Youth crime and delinquency in and out of school

This paper combines ten years of idiosyncratic variation in school closure dates for all secondary schools in England with administrative records of educational and criminal trajectories linked at the individual level to...Read more...

Janine Boshoff, Stephen Machin and Matteo Sandi

10 April 2025

CEP discussion paper
Firm dynamics and growth with soft budget constraints

We develop a model of endogenous growth and firm dynamics with soft budget constraints, where firms differ in their innovation speed and slower firms need additional financing in order to eventually innovate. As creditor...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Mathias Dewatripont and Johannes Matt

10 April 2025

CEP discussion paper
Teaching happiness (economics) in your dismal-science courses

This paper discusses ideas for incorporating the study of happiness and other measures of self-reported or subjective well-being (SWB) into undergraduate economics courses. We begin by motivating why students of economic...Read more...

Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz, John Ifcher, Ekaterina Oparina and Stephen Wu

7 April 2025

CEP discussion paper
Immigration demand, supply and sectoral heterogeneity in the UK labour market

Should immigration be regarded as an exogenous shock? If so, what is its effect on native wages? Might any effect differ across different sectors of the economy? In this paper we answer these questions by applying macroe...Read more...

Andrew Mountford and Jonathan Wadsworth

1 April 2025

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