Discussion papers

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

All Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper

The indirect effect of the Russian-Ukrainian war through international linkages: early evidence from the stock market

We study how firms' international linkages to Russia and Ukraine have affected investors' expectations following the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war. We perform an event study around the Russian invasion into Ukrai...Read more...

Marcus Biermann and Elsa Leromain

26 January 2023

CEP discussion paper

The economics of cities: from theory to data

Economic activity is highly unevenly distributed within cities, as reflected in the concentration of economic functions in specific locations, such as finance in the Square Mile in London. The extent to which this concen...Read more...

Stephen J. Redding

25 January 2023

CEP discussion paper

Criminal charges, risk assessment and violent recidivism in cases of domestic abuse

Domestic abuse is a pervasive global problem. Here we analyze two approaches to reducing violent DA recidivism. One involves charging the perpetrator with a crime; the other provides protective services to the victim on ...Read more...

Dan A. Black, Jeffrey Grogger, Tom Kirchmaier and Koen Sanders

20 January 2023

CEP discussion paper

Do role models matter in large classes? New evidence on gender match effects in higher education

We study whether female students benefit from being taught by female professors, and whether such gender match effects differ by class size. We use administrative records of a German public university, covering all progr...Read more...

Stephan Maurer, Guido Schwerdt and Simon Wiederhold

9 January 2023

CEP discussion paper

Collective bargaining and spillovers in local labor markets

How does collective bargaining affect the broader wage structure? How are such spillovers transmitted? I present a model where firms with wage-setting power that are not covered by collective bargaining agreements, but a...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier

13 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

(In)convenient stores? What do policies pushing stores to town centres actually do?

England's Town Centre First Policy, introduced in 1996, restricted the opening of new retail and other 'traditional town centre activities' to 'Town Centre' (TC) locations. The aim was to halt the decay of high streets. ...Read more...

Paul C. Cheshire, Christian A. L. Hilber, Piero Montebruno and Rosa Sanchis-Guarner

12 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

The geography of structural transformation: Effects on inequality and mobility

The interplay between structural transformation in the aggregate and local economies is key to understanding spatial inequality and worker mobility. This paper develops a dynamic overlapping generations model of economic...Read more...

Kohei Takeda

12 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

The spillover effect of services offshoring on local labour markets

I provide new empirical evidence on the direct and indirect impact of services off-shoring on local employment and wages, using a unique dataset on firms in the UK for the period 2000-2015. Exploiting variation in firms'...Read more...

Martina Magli

9 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

Gender stereotypes in the family

We study whether and why parents have gender-stereotyped beliefs when they assess their child's skills. Exploiting systematic differences in parental beliefs about a child's skills and blindly graded standardized test sc...Read more...

Cheti Nicoletti, Almudena Sevilla and Valentina Tonei

8 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

New dawn fades: Trade, labour and the Brexit exchange rate depreciation

This paper studies consequences of the very large exchange rate depreciation occurring in June 2016 due to the UK electorate unexpectedly voting to leave the European Union. As news of a leave vote came in, the value of ...Read more...

Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin

7 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

Defying distance? The provision of services in the digital age

Digital platforms are transforming services by making the physical distance between provider and user less relevant. I quantify the potential gains this flexibility offers in the context of digital primary care in Sweden...Read more...

Amanda Dahlstrand

7 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

Non-tariff barriers and consumer prices: evidence from Brexit

Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) are the main policy impediment to international trade, yet little is known about their pass-through to prices. This paper exploits the Brexit trade policy shock to quantify how NTBs affect cons...Read more...

Jan David Bakker, Nikhil Datta, Richard Davies and Josh De Lyon

1 December 2022

CEP discussion paper

Families, labor markets and policy

Using comparable data for 24 countries since the 1970s, we document gender convergence in schooling, employment and earnings, marriage delay and the accompanying decline in fertility, and the large remaining gaps in labo...Read more...

Stefania Albanesi, Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

24 November 2022

CEP discussion paper

Sanctions and misallocation. How sanctioned firms won and Russia lost

Using a unique natural experiment of staggered firm-level sanctions against Russia in 2014-2020 and the data on over 900,000 Russian firms, I estimate the effect of sanctions on targeted firms and on the aggregate econom...Read more...

Dzhamilya Nigmatulina

23 November 2022

CEP discussion paper

Who's got the power? Wage determination and its resilience in the Great Recession

Whereas wage inequality has risen markedly in most OECD countries in recent decades, it has fallen in several Southern European economies. To shed light on this phenomenon, we embed sectoral bargaining, which is common i...Read more...

Hugo Reis and Hugo de Almeida Vilares

17 November 2022

CEP discussion paper

Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution

Did overseas slave-holding by Britons accelerate the Industrial Revolution? We provide theory and evidence on the contribution of slave wealth to Britain's growth prior to 1835. We compare areas of Britain with high and ...Read more...

Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth

16 November 2022

CEP discussion paper

The wage elasticity of recruitment

One of the factors affecting the market power of employers is the extent to which higher wages makes recruitment easier. There is very little research on this. This paper presents a methodology for estimating the wage el...Read more...

Boris Hirsch, Elke J. Jahn, Alan Manning and Michael Oberfichtner

8 November 2022

CEP discussion paper

From public labs to private firms: magnitude and channels of R&D spillovers

Introducing a new measure of scientific proximity between private firms and public research groups and exploiting a multi-billion euro financing program of academic clusters in France, we provide causal evidence of spill...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Arthur Guillouzouic, Emeric Henry and Clement Malgouyres

26 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Patents that match your standards: firm-level evidence on competition and innovation

When a technology becomes the new standard, the firms that are leaders in producing this technology have a competitive advantage. Matching the semantic content of patents to standards and exploiting the exogenous timing ...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Julia Schmidt and Riccardo Zago

24 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Background matters, but not whether parents are immigrants: outcomes of children born in Denmark

On average, children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnings, higher unemployment, less education, more welfare transfers, and more criminal convictions than children with loc...Read more...

Mathias Fjaellegaard Jensen and Alan Manning

17 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Sparse production networks

Firm-to-firm connections in domestic and international production networks play a fundamental role in economic outcomes. Firm heterogeneity and the sparse nature of firm-to-firm connections implicitly discipline network ...Read more...

Andrew B. Bernard and Yuan Zi

17 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Can grit be taught? Lessons from a nationwide field experiment with middle-school students

We study whether a particular socio-emotional skill - grit (the ability to sustain effort and interest towards long-term goals) - can be cultivated through a large-scale program, and how this affects student learning. Us...Read more...

Omar Arias, Pedro Carneiro, Angela Duckworth, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Christian Krekel, Ana Maria Munoz Boudet, Violeta Petroska-Beska and Indhira Santos

17 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Mobile internet and the rise of political tribalism in Europe

We study the political effects of the diffusion of mobile Internet between 2007 and 2017, using data on electoral outcomes and on mobile Internet signal across the 84,564 municipalities of 22 European countries. We find ...Read more...

Marco Manacorda, Guido Tabellini and Andrea Tesei

14 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

The rise of China's technological power: the perspective from frontier technologies

We use patent data to study the contribution of the US, Europe, China and Japan to frontier technology using automated patent landscaping. We find that China's contribution to frontier technology has become quantitativel...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise

14 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Labor market insurance policies in the XXI century

The recovery from the Covid-19 crisis will force governments to accelerate transformation in their menu of labor market policy tools. The crisis was a stress test for unemployment insurance schemes as it involved a sudde...Read more...

Tito Boeri and Pierre Cahuc

11 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Charity in the time of austerity: in search of the 'Big Society'

The years after the election of the UK's coalition government in 2010 saw a decline in central funding to local government and a fall in expenditure on a range of local services, including social services. These cuts wer...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons and Christian Hilber

10 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Cultural homophily and collaboration in superstar teams

One may reasonably think that cultural preferences affect collaboration in multinational teams in general, but not in superstar teams of professionals at the top of their industry. We reject this hypothesis by creating a...Read more...

Gabor Bekes and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

7 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Firms and inequality when unemployment is high

How important are firms for wage inequality in developing countries where structural unemployment is high? Research focused on contexts close to full employment has suggested a substantial role of firms in labor market i...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier

7 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

Managerial input and firm performance. Evidence from a policy experiment

We study the effects of a subsidy program designed to boost small and medium enterprises' export capabilities through a Temporary Export Manager (TEM), hired for at least 6 months to provide consulting on how to reach fo...Read more...

Francesco Manaresi, Alessandro Palma, Luca Salvatici and Vincenzo Scrutinio

5 October 2022

CEP discussion paper

The well-being cost of inflation inequalities

In terms of well-being, how costly is inflation? To answer this question, empirical evaluations have typically studied average inflation rates at the national level, thus disregarding the role of inflation inequalities w...Read more...

Alberto Prati

13 September 2022

CEP discussion paper

Company wage policy in a low-wage labor market

The question of how firms set wages for their employees has been of longstanding interest. In this paper, we investigate what models of wage determination are at play in a low-wage labor market. We exploit a sizable and ...Read more...

Giulia Giupponi and Stephen Machin

13 September 2022

CEP discussion paper

The impact of public transportation and commuting on urban labour markets: evidence from the new survey of London life and labour, 1929-32

This paper examines the consequences of the commuter transport revolution on working-class labour markets in London, circa 1930. Using GIS-based data constructed from the New Survey of London Life and Labour, we examine ...Read more...

Andrew Seltzer and Jonathan Wadsworth

5 September 2022

CEP discussion paper

The costs and benefits of rules of origin in modern free trade agreements

We study the welfare impact of rules of origin in free trade agreements where final-good producers source customized inputs from suppliers within the trading bloc. We employ a property-rights framework that features hold...Read more...

Emanuel Ornelas and John L. Turner

31 August 2022

CEP discussion paper

Globalization and market power

Economic theory suggests that the markup is a key measure of market power and that its relationship with trade is rich and complex. Trade liberalisation can reduce markups via a decline in the residual domestic demand bu...Read more...

Giammario Impullitti and Syed Kazmi

26 August 2022

CEP discussion paper

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

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

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

28 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

Acquisitions, management and efficiency in Rwanda's coffee industry

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

Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

21 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

Human wellbeing and machine learning

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

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

20 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Fabrizio Leone, Rocco Macchiavello and Tristan Reed

19 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

Social push and the direction of innovation

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

Elias Einio, Josh Feng and Xavier Jaravel

13 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

Endogenous cross-region human mobility and pandemics

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

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

13 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

Nonparametric measurement of long-run growth in consumer welfare

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

Xavier Jaravel and Danial Lashkari

12 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

Political adverse selection

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

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

12 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

Firm-level technological change and skill demand

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

Attila Lindner, Balazs Murakozy, Balazs Reizer and Ragnhild Schreiner

1 July 2022

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralph R. Meisenzahl

30 June 2022

CEP discussion paper

Accidents will happen: (de)regulation of health and safety legislation, workplace accidents and self employment

In 2015, the UK government exempted "low-risk" self-employed workers from legislation on workplace safety. This reversed a move two decades earlier that incorporated the self-employed more fully into the same regulatory ...Read more...

Donna Brown and Jonathan Wadsworth

22 June 2022

CEP discussion paper

Foreign ownership and robot adoption

This paper shows that multinational enterprises (MNEs) spur the adoption of industrial robots. First, I document a positive and robust correlation between multinational production and robot adoption using a new cross-cou...Read more...

Fabrizio Leone

8 June 2022

CEP discussion paper

What makes a satisfying life? Prediction and interpretation with machine-learning algorithms

Machine Learning (ML) methods are increasingly being used across a variety of fields and have led to the discovery of intricate relationships between variables. We here apply ML methods to predict and interpret life sati...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio, Niccolo Gentile and Alexandre Tkatchenko

7 June 2022

CEP discussion paper

Structural change within versus across firms: evidence from the United States

We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' "auxiliary" establishments, we develop a novel ...Read more...

Xiang Ding, Teresa C. Fort, Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott

1 June 2022

CEP discussion paper

Social policy gone bad educationally: unintended peer effects from transferred students

Policy makers frequently use education as a welfare policy instrument. We examine one such case, where students from large and financially constrained families, were given the opportunity to be transferred to university ...Read more...

Christos Genakos and Eleni Kyrkopoulou

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

A new dataset to study a century of innovation in Europe and in the US

Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper,...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

Education inequality

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic...Read more...

Jo Blanden, Matthias Doepke and Jan Stuhler

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

Ask a local: improving the public pricing of land titles in urban Tanzania

Information on willingness-to-pay is key for public pricing and allocation of services but not easily collected. Studying land titles in Dar-es-Salaam, we ask whether local leaders know and will reveal plot owners' willi...Read more...

Martina Manara and Tanner Regan

28 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

UK trade in the wake of Brexit

This paper studies the impact of Brexit on the UK's trade with the EU relative to its trade with the rest of the world. We find no evidence that uncertainty and anticipation effects led to a significant decline in relati...Read more...

Rebecca Freeman, Kalina Manova, Thomas Prayer and Thomas Sampson

26 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

Pay, productivity and management

Using confidential Census matched employer-employee earnings data we find that employees at more productive firms, and firms with more structured management practices, have substantially higher pay, both on average and a...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Scott W. Ohlmacher, Cristina J. Tello-Trillo and Melanie Wallskog

7 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

The anatomy of a hospital system merger: the patient did not respond well to treatment

Despite the continuing US hospital merger wave, it remains unclear how mergers change, or fail to change, hospital behavior and performance. We open the "black box" of hospital practices through a mega-merger between two...Read more...

Martin Gaynor, Adam Sacarny, Raffaella Sadun, Chad Syverson and Shruthi Venkatesh

7 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

How does working from home during Covid-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on ...Read more...

Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer and Thomaz Teodorovicz

6 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

Managing export complexity: the role of service outsourcing

Exporting involves sunk and fixed costs in the form of service inputs, and whether such services are 'made' in-house or 'bought' from external agencies is a key organizational margin: it is not a core-competence of manuf...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri and Frank Pisch

6 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

The world uncertainty index

We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word "uncertainty" in the quarterly Economist Intelligence U...Read more...

Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri

5 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to access current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer and Thomaz Teodorovicz

5 April 2022

CEP discussion paper

The impact of mental health support for the chronically ill on hospital utilisation: evidence from the UK

Individuals with common mental disorders (CMDs) such as depression and anxiety frequently have co-occurring long-term physical health conditions (LTCs) and this co-occurrence is associated with higher hospital utilisatio...Read more...

Jonathan Gruber, Grace Lordan, Stephen Pilling, Carol Propper and Rob Saunders

25 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

Tuition fees and educational attainment

Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which were subsequently abolished until 2015. We exploit the unusual lack of grandfathering in these poli...Read more...

Jan Bietenbeck, Andreas Leibing, Jan Marcus and Felix Weinhardt

16 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

Firms and Inequality

In the last few decades, dramatic changes have been documented in the US business landscape. These include rising productivity and pay dispersion between firms, higher aggregate markups (of price over variable costs), gr...Read more...

Jan De Loecker, Tim Obermeier and John Van Reenen

9 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

Managerial and financial barriers during the green transition

We use data on 10,852 firms across 22 emerging markets to analyse how credit constraints and deficient firm management inhibit corporate investment in green technologies. For identification, we exploit quasi-exogenous va...Read more...

Ralph De Haas, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls and Helena Schweiger

7 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

Is online retail killing coffee shops? Estimating the winners and losers of online retail using customer transaction microdata

Is online retail a complement or substitute to local offline economies? This paper provides the first evidence that consumers use time saved from online retail to increase their trips for time-intensive services like cof...Read more...

Lindsay E. Relihan

3 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

A few Euro more: benefit generosity and the optimal path of unemployment benefits

In this paper, we exploit the provision of higher UB at different points of the unemployment spell to shed light on the relative cost of insurance at different horizons after the job loss. First, we exploit a double cap ...Read more...

Anna D'Ambrosio and Vincenzo Scrutinio

3 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge spillovers from clean and emerging technologies in the UK

The UK government has committed to increase R&D support for clean technologies in an effort to meet its net-zero target by 2050. The opportunity cost of such programs crucially depends on the value of knowledge spillover...Read more...

Ralf Martin and Dennis Verhoeven

2 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

Epidemics and rapacity of multinational companies

Do multinationals engage in rent-seeking behaviour in developing countries during crises? With a difference in discontinuity approach, we use the Ebola epidemic in Liberia as a natural experiment on the sharp increase in...Read more...

Tommaso Sonno and Davide Zufacchi

1 March 2022

CEP discussion paper

A policy toolkit to increase research and innovation in the European Union

What research and innovation (R&I) policies should Europe adopt? The world faces a challenge to rebuild after the pandemic, but also faces the same structural slowdown of productivity growth that occurred in the decades ...Read more...

Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

25 February 2022

CEP discussion paper

Working from home and corporate real estate

We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the take-off of teleworking. We develop an indicator of the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentiv...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Jean Benoit Eymeoud, Thomas Garcia and Dorian Henricot

24 February 2022

CEP discussion paper

The making of civic virtues: a school-based experiment in three countries

With the rise of polarization and extremism, the question of how best to transmit civic virtues across generations is more acute than ever. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that schools can be the place for this tra...Read more...

Simon Briole, Marc Gurgand, Eric Maurin, Sandra McNally, Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela and Daniel Santin

22 February 2022

CEP discussion paper

House price expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a...Read more...

Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan, Claus Michelsen and Felix Weinhardt

10 February 2022

CEP discussion paper

Trade persistence and trader identity - evidence from the demise of the Hanseatic League

How do trade networks persist following disruptions of political networks? We study different types of persistence following the decline of the Hanseatic League using a panel of 21,590 city-level trade flows over 190 yea...Read more...

Max Marczinek, Stephan E. Maurer and Ferdinand Rauch

2 February 2022

CEP discussion paper

Omnia Juncta in Uno*: foreign powers and trademark protection in Shanghai's concession era

We investigate how firms and markets adapt to trademark protection, an extensively used but under-examined form of IP protection to address asymmetric information, by exploring a historical precedent: China's trademark l...Read more...

Laura Alfaro, Cathy Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong and Claudia Steinwender

2 February 2022

CEP discussion paper

Technology transfer in global value chains

Firm-to-firm relationships in global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and in-put production tech...Read more...

Thomas Sampson

1 February 2022

CEP discussion paper

Management and misallocation in Mexico

We argue that greater misallocation is a key driver of the worse management practices in Mexico compared to the US. These management practices are strongly associated with higher productivity, growth, trade, and innovati...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Leonardo Iacovone, Mariana Pereira-Lopez and John Van Reenen

25 January 2022

CEP discussion paper

Expecting Brexit

The Brexit vote precipitated the unravelling of the UK's membership of the world's deepest economic integration agreement. This paper reviews evidence on the realized economic effects of Brexit. The 2016 Brexit referendu...Read more...

Swati Dhingra and Thomas Sampson

25 January 2022

CEP discussion paper

Optimal minimum wages

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

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel

20 January 2022

CEP discussion paper

Local retail prices, product varieties and neighborhood change

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

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

20 January 2022

CEP discussion paper

Do well managed firms make better forecasts?

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

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

5 January 2022

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Oriana Bandiera, Nidhi Parekh, Barbara Petrongolo and Michelle Rao

17 December 2021

CEP discussion paper

The environmental cost of the international job market for economists

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

Olivier Chanel, Alberto Prati and Morgan Raux

15 December 2021

CEP discussion paper

Product market competition, creative destruction and innovation

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

Rachel Griffith and John Van Reenen

30 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

Air pollution and innovation

If air pollution harms innovation -- and therefore future productivity -- existing assessments of its economic cost are incomplete. We estimate the effect of fine particulate matter concentration on inventive output in 1...Read more...

Felix Bracht and Dennis Verhoeven

26 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

Labor unions and the electoral consequences of trade liberalization

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

Pedro Molina Ogeda, Emanuel Ornelas and Rodrigo R. Soares

17 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Parag A. Pathak, Kevin Ren and Camille Terrier

15 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

Population growth, immigration and labour market dynamics

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

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

10 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

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

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

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

4 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

Have productivity and pay decoupled in the UK?

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

Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

3 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

AI-tocracy

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

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

2 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

Strategic confusopoly: evidence from the UK mobile market

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

Christos Genakos, Tobias Kretschmer and Ambre Nicolle

1 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

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

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

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

1 November 2021

CEP discussion paper

Do carbon offsets offset carbon?

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

Raphael Calel, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezleprêtre and Matthieu Glachant

29 October 2021

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Luke Milsom and Isabelle Roland

28 October 2021

CEP discussion paper

Intangibles and industry concentration: supersize me

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

Matej Bajgar, Chiara Criscuolo and Jonathan Timmis

28 October 2021

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Luis Bosshart and Jeremiah Dittmar

22 October 2021

CEP discussion paper

Business groups as knowledge-based hierarchies of firms

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

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

15 October 2021

CEP discussion paper

Living wages and age discontinuities for low-wage workers

This paper considers an emerging, highly policy relevant feature of minimum wages, studying what happens when a wage floor significantly higher than a nationally legislated minimum is imposed. The consequences of age-wag...Read more...

Nikhil Datta and Stephen Machin

23 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

Trade, gravity and aggregation

Gravity regressions are a common tool in the empirical international trade literature and serve an important function for many policy purposes. We study to what extent micro-level parameters can be recovered from gravity...Read more...

Holger Breinlich, Dennis Novy and J.M.C. Santos Silva

22 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

The impact of healthcare IT on clinical quality, productivity and workers

Adoption of health information and communication technologies ('HICT') has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivit...Read more...

Ari Bronsoler, Joseph Doyle and John Van Reenen

14 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

The backlash of globalization

We review the literature on the globalization backlash, seen as the political shift of voters and parties in a protectionist and isolationist direction, with substantive implications on governments' leaning and enacted p...Read more...

Italo Colantone, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Piero Stanig

13 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

Internet access and its implications for productivity, inequality and resilience

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet...Read more...

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis

10 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

The diffusion of disruptive technologies

We identify novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls. Our approach enables us to identify and document the diffusion of 29 disruptive technologies across firms and labor mark...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Tarek Alexander Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Josh Lerner and Ahmed Tahoun

10 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

The demand for executive skills

We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into...Read more...

Joe Fuller, Stephen Hansen, Tejas Ramdas and Raffaella Sadun

8 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

Communication within firms: evidence from CEO turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level measures derived from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms to study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover le...Read more...

Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

8 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

Organizational capacity and profit shifting

This paper analyses the effect of a firm's organizational capacity on the reported profitability of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Better organizational practices improve productivity and the potential taxable profits...Read more...

Katarzyna Bilicka and Daniela Scur

7 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

Income and the desire to migrate

We analyse the role of household and country-level personal income in explaining both the desire to emigrate and the desired destination country. We use data from the Gallup World Poll and applications to the US Diversit...Read more...

Monica Langella and Alan Manning

6 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

The donut effect of Covid-19 on cities

Using data from the US Postal Service and Zillow, we quantify the effect of Covid-19 on migration patterns and real estate markets within and across US cities. We find two key results. First, within large US cities, hous...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom and Arjun Ramani

2 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

This time is not so different: income dynamics during the Covid-19 recession

We use a UK employer-employee administrative earnings dataset to investigate the response of earnings and hours to business cycles. Exploiting our long panel of data from 1975 to 2020 we find wide heterogeneity in the ex...Read more...

Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom and Jack Blundell

2 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

Intra-bloc tariffs and preferential margins in trade agreements

We study, theoretically and empirically, how countries choose intra-bloc tariffs and preferential margins when they form Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Our model indicates that countries should set systematically ...Read more...

Emanuel Ornelas and Patricia Tovar

1 September 2021

CEP discussion paper

Why working from home will stick

COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home (WFH). We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays w...Read more...

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis

13 August 2021

CEP discussion paper

What triggers stock market jumps?

We examine next-day newspaper accounts of large daily jumps in 16 national stock markets to assess their proximate cause, clarity as to cause, and the geographic source of the market-moving news. Our sample of 6,200 mark...Read more...

Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis and Marco Sammon

13 August 2021

CEP discussion paper

The impact of Covid-19 on US firms

We use survey data on an opt-in panel of around 2,500 US small businesses to assess the impact of COVID-19. We find a significant negative sales impact that peaked in Quarter 2 of 2020, with an average loss of 29% in sal...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Robert S. Fletcher and Ethan Yeh

12 August 2021

CEP discussion paper

Opposing firm-level responses to the China shock: horizontal competition versus vertical relationships

We decompose the "China shock" into two components that induce different adjustments for firms exposed to Chinese exports: a horizontal shock affecting firms selling goods that compete with similar imported Chinese goods...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Matthieu Lequien, Marc J. Melitz and Thomas Zuber

9 August 2021

CEP discussion paper

Voting under threat: evidence from the 2020 French local elections

We study how Covid-related risk affected participation across the French territory in the March 2020 local elections. We document that participation went down disproportionately in towns exposed to higher Covid-19 risk. ...Read more...

Elsa Leromain and Gonzague Vannoorenberghe

30 July 2021

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic spatial general equilibrium

We develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model with forward-looking investment and migration decisions. We characterize analytically the transition path of the spatial distribution of economic activity in respons...Read more...

Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding

28 July 2021

CEP discussion paper

Technological change and domestic outsourcing

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered dif...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Clement Malgouyres, Clement Mazet-Sonilhac and Sara Signorelli

28 July 2021

CEP discussion paper

Firm export responses to tariff hikes

We study how firms react to unexpected increases in import tariffs. We identify our results from a sudden removal of American preferential tariffs applied on Argentine imports under the Generalized System of Preferences,...Read more...

Facundo Albornoz, Irene Brambilla and Emanuel Ornelas

28 July 2021

CEP discussion paper

Micro-geographic property price and rent indices

We develop a programming algorithm that predicts a balanced-panel mix-adjusted house price index for arbitrary spatial units from repeated cross-sections of geocoded micro data. The algorithm combines parametric and non-...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Stephan Heblich and Tobias Seidel

20 July 2021

CEP discussion paper

Football, alcohol and domestic abuse

We study the role of alcohol and emotions in explaining the dynamics in domestic abuse following major football games. We match confidential and uniquely detailed individual call data from Greater Manchester with the tim...Read more...

Ria Ivandic, Tom Kirchmaier and Neus Torres-Blas

4 July 2021

CEP discussion paper

The measure of monopsony

There has been increasing interest in recent years in monopsony in labour market. This paper discusses how we can measure monopsony power combining insights from models based on both frictions and idiosyncrasies. It pres...Read more...

Monica Langella and Alan Manning

30 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Import liberalization as export destruction? Evidence from the United States

How does import protection affect export performance? In trade models with scale economies, import liberalization can reduce an industry's exports by cutting domestic production. We find this export destruction mechanism...Read more...

Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, Dennis Novy and Thomas Sampson

30 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Marriage as insurance: job protection and job insecurity in France

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it. We here consider marriage as a way of insuring against labour-market risk. The 199...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio and Anthony Lepinteur

30 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Trade and innovation

Two central insights from the Schumpeterian approach to innovation and growth are that the pace of innovation is endogenously determined by the expectation of future profits and that growth is inherently a process of cre...Read more...

Marc J. Melitz and Stephen J. Redding

17 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Machine learning in international trade research - evaluating the impact of trade agreements

Modern trade agreements contain a large number of provisions besides tariff reductions, in areas as diverse as services trade, competition policy, trade-related investment measures, or public procurement. Existing resear...Read more...

Holger Breinlich, Valentina Corradi, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, J.M.C. Santos Silva and Tom Zylkin

16 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Service offshoring and export experience

Service inputs are a key component of the costs of exporting, and contribute to explain the process of internationalization of firms. A new dataset on the participation of French firms in global value chains reveals that...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Luca Marcolin and Emanuel Ornelas

3 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Sequential exporting across countries and products

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a c...Read more...

Facundo Albornoz, Hector F. Calvo Pardo, Gregory Corcos and Emanuel Ornelas

2 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Innovation, growth and the transition to net-zero emissions

The climate crisis and the global economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis occur against a background of slowing growth and widening inequalities, which together imply an urgent need for a new environmentally sustainable a...Read more...

Nicholas Stern and Anna Valero

1 June 2021

CEP discussion paper

Happy to help: The welfare effects of a nationwide micro-volunteering programme

There is a strong suggestion from the existing literature that volunteering improves the wellbeing of those who give up their time to help others, but much of it is correlational and not causal. In this paper, we estimat...Read more...

Paul Dolan, Christian Krekel, Helen Lee, Claire Marshall, Ganga Shreedhar and Allison Smith

31 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

The trade impact of the Covid-19 pandemic

Using a gravity-like approach, we study how Covid-19 deaths and lockdown policies affected countries' imports from China during 2020. We find that a country's own Covid-19 deaths and lockdowns significantly reduced its i...Read more...

Xuepeng Liu, Emanuel Ornelas and Huimin Shi

26 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

Friday morning fever. Evidence from a randomized experiment on sick leave monitoring in the public sector

Absent providers of key public services, such as schooling and health, are a major problem in both developed and developing countries. This paper provides the first analysis of a population-wide controlled field experime...Read more...

Tito Boeri, Paolo Naticchioni, Vincenzo Scrutinio and Edoardo di Porto

21 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

Recidivism and neighborhood institutions: evidence from the rise of the evangelical church in Chile

Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison only a few years after their release. Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crime desistance, particularly amon...Read more...

Andrés Barrios Fernández and Jorge Garcia-Hombrados

21 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

Suburbanization in the United States 1970-2010

The second half of the twentieth century saw large-scale suburbanization in the United States, with the median share of residents who work in the same county where they live falling from 87 to 71 percent between 1970 and...Read more...

Stephen J. Redding

19 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

Education and management practices

The empirical management literature has found that the education of both managers and the workforce more generally appears to be an important driver of better management practices. This article sets out how such relation...Read more...

Anna Valero

12 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

Judge Dread: court severity, repossession risk and demand in mortgage and housing markets

We study the impact of borrower protection on mortgage and housing demand. We focus on variation in the likelihood that a house is repossessed - conditional on the mortgage being in arrears and taken to court - coming fr...Read more...

Piero Montebruno, Olmo Silva and Nikodem Szumilo

11 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

Formation of college plans: expected returns, preferences and adjustment process

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study the determinants of college attendance and the role played by one's environment. We analyze whether, and how quickly, adolescents' college plans are adapted, explore factors le...Read more...

Ghazala Azmat and Katja Kaufmann

5 May 2021

CEP discussion paper

Education and economic growth

This paper summarises the literature that has linked education and economic growth. It begins with an overview of the key concepts in neoclassical and endogenous growth models, and discussion on how these have been teste...Read more...

Anna Valero

28 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Innovation and human capital policy

If innovation is to be subsidized, a natural place to start is to increase the quantity and quality of human capital. Innovation, after all, begins with people. Simply stimulating the “demand side” through R&D subsidies ...Read more...

John Van Reenen

20 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: a longitudinal study of lottery wins

Can capital constraints explain why there are more male than female entrepreneurs in most societies? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we fi...Read more...

Sarah Flèche, Anthony Lepinteur and Nattavudh Powdthavee

19 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Take the highway? Paved roads and well-being in Africa

Public Goods aim to improve individual welfare. We investigate the causal consequences of roads on well-being in 24 African countries, instrumenting paved roads by 19th Century hypothetical lines between major ports and ...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio and Elodie Djemaï

14 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Opening up military innovation: causal effects of 'bottom-up' reforms to U.S. defense research

Organizations investing in R&D must decide whether to solicit specific technologies or allow innovators to suggest ideas. Using administrative data, we study the 'Open' reform to U.S. Air Force R&D procurement, which inv...Read more...

Sabrina T. Howell, Jason Rathje, John Van Reenen and Jun Wong

13 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Remote talks: changes to economics seminars during Covid-19

This paper analyzes the consequences of the change in the presentation mode of economics seminars triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The composition of seminar speakers changed significantly. The leading economists gain...Read more...

Marcus Biermann

13 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Cities and the sea level

Construction on low elevation coastal zones is risky for both residents and taxpayers who bail them out, especially when sea levels are rising. We study this construction using spatially disaggregated data on the US Atla...Read more...

Yatang Lin, Thomas K.J. McDermott and Guy Michaels

13 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Does growing up in a recession increase compassion? The case of attitudes towards immigration

Macroeconomic conditions during young adulthood have a persistent impact on people's attitudes and preferences. The seminal paper by Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2014) shows that people who grew up in a recession are more l...Read more...

Maria Cotofan, Robert Dur and Stephan Meier

1 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Trends in intergenerational home ownership and wealth transmission

Prior research on trends in intergenerational mobility in economic status has focused chiefly on income and earnings. There is hardly any research on trends in intergenerational wealth transmission, at least in part beca...Read more...

Jo Blanden, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin

1 April 2021

CEP discussion paper

Data-intensive innovation and the State: evidence from AI firms in China

Artificial intelligence (AI) innovation is data-intensive. States have historically collected large amounts of data, which is now being used by AI firms. Gathering comprehensive information on firms and government procur...Read more...

Martin Beraja, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman

31 March 2021

CEP discussion paper

Globalization, trade imbalances and labor market adjustment

We study the role of global trade imbalances in shaping the adjustment dynamics in response to trade shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multi-country, multi-sector model of trade with two key ingredient...Read more...

Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Joao Paulo Pessoa, Ricardo Reyes-Heroles and Sharon Traiberman

22 March 2021

CEP discussion paper

Working life and human capital investment

This paper provides a novel test of a key prediction of human capital theory that educational investment decisions depend on the length of the pay-off period. We obtain causal estimates by leveraging a unique reform of t...Read more...

Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan, Elisabeth Kurz and Felix Weinhardt

19 March 2021

CEP discussion paper

Gravity with granularity

We evaluate the consequences of oligopolistic behavior for the estimation of gravity equations for trade flows. With oligopolistic competition, firm-level gravity equations based on a standard CES demand framework need t...Read more...

Holger Breinlich, Harald Fadinger, Volker Nocke and Nicolas Schutz

15 March 2021

CEP discussion paper

Non-compete agreements, wages and efficiency: theory and evidence from Brazilian football

We propose a model to study non-compete agreements and evaluate their quantitative effects. We explore an exogenous policy change that removed non-compete clauses in the market for Brazilian footballers, the Pele Act of ...Read more...

Bernardo Guimaraes, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek

8 March 2021

CEP discussion paper

Wage responses to gender pay gap reporting requirements

In this paper I study a policy in which employers are required to publicly report gender pay gap statistics. Proponents argue that increasing the information available to workers and consumers places pressure on firms to...Read more...

Jack Blundell

5 March 2021

CEP discussion paper

Maternal depression and child human capital: a genetic instrumental-variable approach

We here address the causal relationship between maternal depression and child human capital using UK cohort data. We exploit the conditionally-exogenous variation in mothers’ genomes in an instrumental-variable approach,...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio, Simone Ghislandi, Anthony Lepinteur and Giorgia Menta

26 February 2021

CEP discussion paper

Unequal learning and labour market losses in the crisis: consequences for social mobility

The unequal learning and labour market losses arising in the UK due to the Covid-19 pandemic are used to assess the consequences for social mobility. Labour market and learning losses have been more pronounced for people...Read more...

Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin

25 February 2021

CEP discussion paper

Commuting for crime

People care about crime, with the spatial distribution of both actual and perceived crime affecting the amenities from living in different areas and residential decisions. The literature finds that crime tends to happen ...Read more...

Tom Kirchmaier, Monica Langella and Alan Manning

19 February 2021

CEP discussion paper

The true returns to the choice of occupation and education

Which occupations are best for wellbeing? There is a large literature on earnings differentials, but less attention has been paid to occupational differences in non-pecuniary rewards. However, information on both types o...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Maria Cotofan and Richard Layard

19 February 2021

CEP discussion paper

Consumption access and agglomeration: evidence from smartphone data

We provide new theory and evidence on the role of consumption access in understanding the agglomeration of economic activity. We combine smartphone data that records user location every 5 minutes of the day with economic...Read more...

Yuhei Miyauchi, Kentaro Nakajima and Stephen J. Redding

18 February 2021

CEP discussion paper

The impact of regulation on innovation

Does regulation affect the pace and nature of innovation and if so, by how much? We build a tractable and quantifiable endogenous growth model with size-contingent regulations. We apply this to population administrative ...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud and John Van Reenen

18 January 2021

CEP discussion paper

Why have house prices risen so much more than rents in superstar cities?

In most countries – particularly in supply constrained superstar cities – house prices have risen much more strongly than rents over the last two decades. We provide an explanation that does not rely on falling interest ...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Andreas Mense

15 January 2021

CEP discussion paper

The impact of non-tariff barriers on trade and welfare

Deep trade agreements are widespread and have taken the world beyond tariff liberalization in goods trade. As the importance of global supply chains and the services sector increased across the world, shallow tariff redu...Read more...

Swati Dhingra, Rebecca Freeman and Hanwei Huang

12 January 2021

CEP discussion paper

Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: The UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000-2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors...Read more...

Josh De Lyon and Joao Paulo Pessoa

11 January 2021

CEP discussion paper

Markups, intangible capital and heterogeneous financial frictions

This paper studies the interaction between financial frictions, intangible investment decisions, and markups at the firm level. In our model, heterogeneous credit constraints distort firms' decisions to invest in cost-re...Read more...

Carlo Altomonte, Domenico Favoino, Monica Morlacco and Tommaso Sonno

8 January 2021

CEP discussion paper

Trade protection along supply chains

During the last decades, the United States has applied increasingly high trade protection against China. We combine detailed information on US antidumping (AD) duties— the most widely used trade barrier — with US input-o...Read more...

Chad Bown, Paola Conconi, Aksel Erbahar and Lorenzo Trimarchi

6 January 2021

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the externalities of renewable energy plants using wellbeing data: The case of biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, o...Read more...

Christian Krekel, Julia Rechlitz, Johannes Rode and Alexander Zerrahn

16 December 2020

CEP discussion paper

The UK's great demand and supply recession

We revisit UK’s poor productivity performance since the Great Recession by means of both a suitable theoretical framework and firm-level prices and quantities data for detailed products allowing us to both measure demand...Read more...

Nick Jacob and Giordano Mion

15 December 2020

CEP discussion paper

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel

10 December 2020

CEP discussion paper

Are bigger banks better? Firm-level evidence from Germany

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in post-war Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after...Read more...

Kilian Huber

9 December 2020

CEP discussion paper

All aboard: the effects of port development

Transport infrastructure facilitates the fast flow of goods and people across space, but it also occupies extensive amounts of land. This may drive up land rents and crowd out other economic activity. Using the introduct...Read more...

César Ducruet, Réka Juhász, Dávid Krisztián Nagy and Claudia Steinwender

8 December 2020

CEP discussion paper

The grandkids aren't alright: the intergenerational effects of prenatal pollution exposure

Using newly linked survey and administrative data, providing more than 150 million parent-child links, we show that regulation-induced improvements in early life air quality have intergenerational effects on human capita...Read more...

Jonathan Colmer and John Voorheis

2 December 2020

CEP discussion paper

Heterogeneity in criminal behaviour after child birth: the role of ethnicity

This paper documents behavioral differences in parental criminality between majority and minority ethnic groups after child birth. The particular effect we exploit is that of the gender of the first-born child on fathers...Read more...

Kabir Dasgupta, André Diegmann, Tom Kirchmaier and Alexander Plum

1 December 2020

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...

Andreas Diemer and Tanner Regan

24 November 2020

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...

Hanming Fang, Chunmian Ge, Hanwei Huang and Hongbin Li

19 November 2020

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...

Ria Ivandic, Tom Kirchmaier and Ben Linton

18 November 2020

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...

Jonathan Colmer, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls and Ulrich J. Wagner

17 November 2020

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...

Tony Beatton, Michael P. Kidd and Matteo Sandi

13 November 2020

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...

Maximilian v. Ehrlich and Henry G. Overman

12 October 2020

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...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Thilo N. H. Albers and Kristian Behrens

5 October 2020

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...

Benjamin Handel, Jonathan Kolstad, Thomas Minten and Johannes Spinnewijn

2 October 2020

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...

Claudia Hupkau and Barbara Petrongolo

2 October 2020

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...

Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein

1 October 2020

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...

Sandra McNally

1 October 2020

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...

Edoardo di Porto, Paolo Naticchioni and Vincenzo Scrutinio

1 October 2020

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...

Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin

30 September 2020

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...

Stephen J. Redding

29 September 2020

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...

Arun Advani, Felix Koenig, Lorenzo Pessina and Andy Summers

24 September 2020

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...

Pol Antràs, Stephen J. Redding and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

21 September 2020

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...

Davin Chor, Kalina Manova and Zhihong Yu

8 September 2020

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...

Luna Bellani, Anselm Hager and Stephan E. Maurer

20 August 2020

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...

Mathias Huebener, Nico A. Siegel, C. Katharina Spiess, Gert G. Wagner and Sevrin Waights

20 August 2020

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...

Alan Manning and Graham Mazeine

18 August 2020

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...

Felipe Carozzi, Sandro Provenzano and Sefi Roth

17 August 2020

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...

Jonas Jessen, C. Katharina Spiess and Sevrin Waights

11 August 2020

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...

Christos Genakos, Felix Grey and Robert A. Ritz

30 July 2020

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...

Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding

20 July 2020

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...

Anthony J. Venables

16 July 2020

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...

Sönke Hendrik Matthewes

14 July 2020

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...

Giordano Mion, Luca David Opromolla and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

13 July 2020

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...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Jason Barr

7 July 2020

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...

Luke Milsom, Vladimír Pažitka, Isabelle Roland and Dariusz Wójcik

6 July 2020

CEP discussion paper

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

Conventional wisdom suggests that marginal damages from particulate matter pollution are high in less-developed countries because they are highly polluted. Using administrative data on the universe of births and deaths, ...Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Dajun Lin, Siying Liu and Jay Shimshack

3 July 2020

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...

Paul Cheshire and Katerina Kaimakamis

29 June 2020

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...

Francesco Campo, Mariapia Mendola, Andrea Morrison and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

23 June 2020

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...

Ali Kabiri, Vlad Malone, Isabelle Roland and Mariana Spatareanu

12 June 2020

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...

Georg Graetz, Oskar Nordström Skans and Björn Öckert

9 June 2020

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...

Federico Cingano and Fadi Hassan

8 June 2020

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...

Piero Montebruno

1 June 2020

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...

Ester Faia, Sebastien Laffitte, Maximilian Mayer and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

29 May 2020

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...

Ulrich J. Eberle

28 May 2020

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...

Abel Brodeur, Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche and Nattavudh Powdthavee

19 May 2020

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...

Fabrice Defever, Jose-Daniel Reyes, Alejandro Riaño and Gonzalo Varela

18 May 2020

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...

Adam Altmejd, Andrés Barrios Fernández, Marin Drlje, Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Dejan Kovac, Christine Mulhern, Christopher Neilson and Jonathan Smith

12 May 2020

CEP discussion paper

Monopsony and the wage effects of migration

In a generalization of the well-known “immigration surplus” result, we show immigration must always increase the average native worker’s marginal product, in any long-run constant returns economy. But in a monopsonistic ...Read more...

Michael Amior and Alan Manning

7 May 2020

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...

Frank Pisch

29 April 2020

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...

Barbara Petrongolo and Maddalena Ronchi

27 April 2020

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...

Nick Jacob and Giordano Mion

22 April 2020

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...

Andrew E. Clark and Anthony Lepinteur

16 April 2020

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...

Richard Disney, John Gathergood, Stephen Machin and Matteo Sandi

31 March 2020

CEP discussion paper

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

We investigate the effects of consumers' environmental concerns and market competition on firms' decisions to innovate in 'clean' technologies. Agents care about their consumption and environmental footprint; firms pursu...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Roland Bénabou, Ralf Martin and Alexandra Roulet

31 March 2020

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...

Georg Graetz

26 March 2020

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...

Rita Cappariello, Sebastian Franco-Bedoya, Vanessa Gunnella and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

26 March 2020

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...

Felipe Carozzi, Christian A. L. Hilber and Xiaolun Yu

13 March 2020

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...

Paul Frijters, Christian Krekel and Aydogan Ulker

13 March 2020

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...

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, David Hemous, Morten Olsen and Carlo Zanella

21 February 2020

CEP discussion paper

The contribution of immigration to local labor market adjustment

The US suffers from persistent local disparities in employment rates, which should in principle be eliminated by population mobility. Can immigration accelerate this process? Remarkably, on average since 1960, new immigr...Read more...

Michael Amior

20 February 2020

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...

Swati Dhingra and Silvana Tenreyro

6 February 2020

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...

Jeffrey Grogger, Ria Ivandic and Tom Kirchmaier

5 February 2020

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...

Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

3 February 2020

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...

Cheng Chen and Claudia Steinwender

31 January 2020

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...

Stefano Bolatto, Alireza Naghavi, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Katja Zajc Kejzar

21 January 2020

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...

Timothy Besley, Isabelle Roland and John Van Reenen

21 January 2020

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...

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Daisy Fancourt, Christian Krekel and Richard Layard

20 January 2020

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...

Tommaso Sonno

14 January 2020

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 accounts explicitly for dynamic local adju...Read more...

Michael Amior

13 January 2020

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...

Antoine Berthou, John Jong-Hyun Chung, Kalina Manova and Charlotte Sandoz Dit Bragard

7 January 2020

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...

Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, Dennis Novy and Thomas Sampson

10 December 2019

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...

Fabrice Defever, Michele Imbruno and Richard Kneller

10 December 2019

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...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Richard Blundell and Rachel Griffith

6 December 2019

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...

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Filip Gesiarz and Tali Sharot

27 November 2019

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...

Felix Koenig

15 November 2019

CEP discussion paper

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

Abstract We examine the impact of government funding for R&D - and defense-related R&D in particular - on privately conducted R&D, and its ultimate effect on productivity growth. We estimate longitudinal models that rel...Read more...

Enrico Moretti, Claudia Steinwender and John Van Reenen

14 November 2019

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...

Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino and Nicola Persico

12 November 2019

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...

Nicolás González-Pampillón

7 November 2019

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...

Walter Bossert, Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio and Anthony Lepinteur

29 October 2019

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...

Andrew E. Clark, Paul Frijters, Christian Krekel and Richard Layard

25 October 2019

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...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Matthieu Lequien and Marc J. Melitz

24 October 2019

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...

Clare Leaver, Renata Lemos and Daniela Scur

21 October 2019

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...

Clément S. Bellet, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

18 October 2019

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...

Matej Bajgar, Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris, Chiara Criscuolo and Jonathan Timmis

9 October 2019

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...

Andrés Barrios Fernández

3 October 2019

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...

Emanuel Ornelas and Laura Puccio

2 October 2019

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...

Giulia Giupponi

1 October 2019

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...

Jonas Jessen, Sophia Schmitz and Sevrin Waights

25 September 2019

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...

Stefano Federico, Fadi Hassan and Veronica Rappoport

19 September 2019

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...

Max Nathan

29 August 2019

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...

Stuart Campbell, Lindsey Macmillan, Richard Murphy and Gill Wyness

28 August 2019

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...

Cong Peng

20 August 2019

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...

Dan Andrews, Chiara Criscuolo and Peter N. Gal

14 August 2019

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...

Christopher Cornwell, Ian M. Schmutte and Daniela Scur

13 August 2019

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...

Paul Dolan, Georgios Kavetsos, Christian Krekel, Dimitris Mavridis, Robert Metcalfe, Claudia Senik, Stefan Szymanski and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

12 August 2019

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...

Xavier Jaravel and Erick Sager

8 August 2019

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...

Johannes Boehm and Jan Sonntag

5 August 2019

CEP discussion paper

Innovation union: costs and benefits of innovation policy coordination

We build a two-region endogenous growth model to analyse the gains from innovation policy cooperation in an economic union. The model is calibrated to two blocks of the EU: the old and new members. R&D subsidy coordinati...Read more...

Fabrice Defever, Giammario Impullitti, Teodora Borota Milicevic and Adam Hal Spencer

2 August 2019

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...

Monica Langella and Alan Manning

26 July 2019

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 on small Greek islands, we study how unanticipated and exogenous ch...Read more...

Christos Genakos and Mario Pagliero

26 July 2019

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...

Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, Dennis Novy and Thomas Sampson

24 July 2019

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...

Maria Sánchez-Vidal

16 July 2019

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...

Felipe Carozzi and Sefi Roth

15 July 2019

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...

Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and Heidi Williams

10 July 2019

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...

Stephan E. Maurer and Ferdinand Rauch

9 July 2019

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...

Nikhil Datta

2 July 2019

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...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Volker Nitsch and Nicolai Wendland

21 June 2019

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...

Grace Lordan and Alistair McGuire

20 June 2019

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...

Per-Anders Edin, Tiernan Evans, Georg Graetz, Sofia Hernnäs and Guy Michaels

18 June 2019

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...

Pawel Bukowski and Filip Novokmet

14 June 2019

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...

Thomas Sampson

10 June 2019

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...

Andrea Ichino, Martin Olsson, Barbara Petrongolo and Peter Skogman Thoursie

7 June 2019

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...

Richard Murphy

6 June 2019

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...

Natalie Chen, Wanyu Chung and Dennis Novy

4 June 2019

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...

Michael Amior and Alan Manning

4 June 2019

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...

Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin

29 May 2019

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...

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Clement Imbert, Maarten Luts, Johannes Spinnewijn and Teodora Tsankova

17 May 2019

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...

David S. Jacks and Dennis Novy

16 May 2019

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...

Giulia Faggio, Olmo Silva and William C. Strange

15 May 2019

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...

Andrew Mountford and Jonathan Wadsworth

7 May 2019

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...

Marta De Philippis and Federico Rossi

3 May 2019

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...

Michael Amior

Revised June 2019

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...

Ria Ivandic, Tom Kirchmaier and Stephen Machin

30 April 2019

CEP discussion paper

The comparative advantage of firms

Resource based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products which use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common input capabilities using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...

Johannes Boehm, Swati Dhingra and John Morrow

17 April 2019

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...

Tito Boeri and Pietro Garibaldi

4 April 2019

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...

Esteban M. Aucejo, Teresa Romano and Eric S. Taylor

1 April 2019

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...

Jane K. Dokko, Benjamin J. Keys and Lindsay E. Relihan

28 March 2019

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...

Antonella Nocco, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Matteo Salto

25 March 2019

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...

Marta Barazzetta, Andrew E. Clark and Conchita D'Ambrosio

22 March 2019

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...

Boris Hirsch, Elke J. Jahn, Alan Manning and Michael Oberfichtner

20 March 2019

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...

Max Nathan and Anna Rosso

20 March 2019

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...

Christopher T. Stanton and Catherine Thomas

19 March 2019

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...

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Christian Krekel and George Ward

15 March 2019

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...

Stephen Gibbons, Cong Peng and Cheng Keat Tang

14 March 2019

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...

Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

5 March 2019

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...

Quentin Coutellier, Greer Gosnell, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls, Goran Strbac, Mingyang Sun and Simon Tindermans

11 February 2019

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...

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Caterina Gennaioli, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls and Thomas Stoerk

11 February 2019

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...

Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold

31 January 2019

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...

Kilian Huber, Volker Lindenthal and Fabian Waldinger

28 January 2019

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...

Julia Cajal-Grossi, Rocco Macchiavello and Guillermo Noguera

28 January 2019

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...

Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen

24 January 2019

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...

Matthew Baird, A.V. Chari, Shanthi Nataraj, Alexander Rothenberg, Shqiponja Telhaj and L. Alan Winters

23 January 2019

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...

Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

16 January 2019

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...

Andy Feng and Anna Valero

16 January 2019

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...

Leonardo Baccini, Giammario Impullitti and Edmund J. Malesky

10 January 2019

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...

Andrew B. Bernard, Emmanuel Dhyne, Glenn Magerman, Kalina Manova and Andreas Moxnes

4 January 2019

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...

Brian Bell, Jack Blundell and Stephen Machin

20 December 2018

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...

Philippe Aghion, Emmanuel Farhi and Enisse Kharroubi

14 December 2018

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...

Ufuk Akcigit, Sina T. Ates and Giammario Impullitti

14 December 2018

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...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Gilbert Cette, Rémy Lecat and Hélène Maghin

11 December 2018

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...

Giammario Impullitti, Omar Licandro and Pontus Rendahl

11 December 2018

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...

Georgios Kavetsos, Ichiro Kawachi, Ilias Kyriopoulos and Sotiris Vandoros

7 December 2018

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...

Giulia Giupponi and Camille Landais

3 December 2018

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...

Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin

27 November 2018

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...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Frank Pisch and Claudia Steinwender

19 November 2018

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...

Michael Amior

5 November 2018

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...

Grant Bickwit, Emanuel Ornelas and John L. Turner

31 October 2018

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...

Maria Molina-Domene

30 October 2018

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...

Arturs Kalnins, Stephen F. Lin and Catherine Thomas

29 October 2018

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...

Emanuel Ornelas and Marcos Ritel

2 October 2018

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...

Matthew Ridley and Camille Terrier

25 September 2018

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...

John Van Reenen

25 September 2018

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...

Margarida Madaleno, Max Nathan, Henry G. Overman and Sevrin Waights

25 September 2018

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...

Esteban M. Aucejo, Patrick Coate, Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, Sean Kelly and Zachary Mozenter

24 September 2018

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...

Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm

12 September 2018

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...

Johannes Boehm and Ezra Oberfield

12 September 2018

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...

Hans R. A. Koster and Edward W. Pinchbeck

10 September 2018

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...

Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson and Ahmed Usman

7 September 2018

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...

J. Vernon Henderson, Sebastian Kriticos and Dzhamilya Nigmatulina

6 September 2018

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...

Philippe Bracke and Silvana Tenreyro

29 August 2018

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...

Ester Faia, Sebastien Laffitte and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

28 August 2018

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...

Brian Bell, Rui Costa and Stephen Machin

24 August 2018

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...

Richard Murphy, Felix Weinhardt and Gill Wyness

14 August 2018

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...

Paola Conconi, Giovanni Facchini, Max F. Steinhardt and Maurizio Zanardi

8 August 2018

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...

Stephen Gibbons, Stephan Heblich and Edward W. Pinchbeck

6 August 2018

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...

Helen Johnson, Sandra McNally, Heather Rolfe, Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela, Robert Savage, Janet Vousden and Clare Wood

1 August 2018

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...

Stephen Gibbons and Daniel J. Graham

26 July 2018

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...

David S. Jacks and Dennis Novy

20 July 2018

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...

Alan Manning and Paolo Masella

17 July 2018

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...

Jan David Bakker, Stephan E. Maurer, Jörn-Steffen Pischke and Ferdinand Rauch

12 July 2018

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...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris and Chiara Criscuolo

12 July 2018

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...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Olivier Schöni

10 July 2018

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...

Filippo Di Mauro, Fadi Hassan and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

3 July 2018

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...

Keith Head, Yao Amber Li and Asier Minondo

20 June 2018

CEP discussion paper

Managing trade: evidence from China and the US

We study how management practices shape export performance using matched production-trade-management data for Chinese and American firms and a randomized control trial in India. Better managed firms are more likely to ex...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Kalina Manova, Stephen Teng Sun, John Van Reenen and Zhihong Yu

20 June 2018

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...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Wolfgang Maennig and Steffen Q. Mueller

19 June 2018

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...

Keith Head and Thierry Mayer

19 June 2018

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...

Natalie Chen and Dennis Novy

15 June 2018

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...

Felipe Carozzi

18 May 2018

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking and John Van Reenen

14 May 2018

CEP discussion paper

Come together: firm boundaries and delegation

We jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them by confronting an incomplete-contracts model with data on vertical integration and delegation for thousands of firms around the world. In...Read more...

Laura Alfaro, Nicholas Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew F. Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

10 May 2018

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...

Jörg Kalbfuß, Reto Odermatt and Alois Stutzer

2 May 2018

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...

Maria Molina-Domene

1 May 2018

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...

Jonathan Colmer

1 May 2018

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...

Andrew B. Bernard, Esther Ann Bøler and Swati Dhingra

30 April 2018

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...

Gerard H. Dericks and Hans R. A. Koster

26 April 2018

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...

Andrew B. Bernard and Andreas Moxnes

24 April 2018

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...

Sevrin Waights

16 April 2018

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...

Zhuan Pei, Jörn-Steffen Pischke and Hannes Schwandt

10 April 2018

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...

Konstantin Büchel and Stephan Kyburz

9 April 2018

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...

Stephen Gibbons, Olmo Silva and Maria Sánchez-Vidal

6 April 2018

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...

Pawel Adrjan and Brian Bell

27 March 2018

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...

Tom Kirchmaier, Stephen Machin, Matteo Sandi and Robert Witt

22 March 2018

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...

Laurent Bouton, Paola Conconi, Francisco Pino and Maurizio Zanardi

22 March 2018

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...

Giulia Giupponi and Stephen Machin

21 March 2018

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...

Swati Dhingra, Rebecca Freeman and Eleonora Mavroeidi

13 March 2018

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...

Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner and Ben Zipperer

16 February 2018

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...

Stephen Gibbons, Vincenzo Scrutinio and Shqiponja Telhaj

12 February 2018

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...

Ghazala Azmat and Stefania Simion

2 February 2018

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...

Renata Lemos and Daniela Scur

29 January 2018

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...

Stephen Machin and Matteo Sandi

25 January 2018

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...

Stephan E. Maurer

3 January 2018

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...

Paola Conconi, Manuel García-Santana, Laura Puccio and Roberto Venturini

19 December 2017

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...

Zack Cooper, Fiona Scott Morton and Nathan Shekita

18 December 2017

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...

Zack Cooper, Amanda Kowalski, Eleanor Neff Powell and Jennifer Wu

14 December 2017

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...

Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Ari Hyytinen and Otto Toivanen

12 December 2017

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...

Andrés Barrios Fernández and Giulia Bovini

12 December 2017

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...

Sara Calligaris, Massimo Del Gatto, Fadi Hassan, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Fabiano Schivardi

11 December 2017

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 the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability ('nature') vs. environment ('nurture'). Using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors...Read more...

Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen

11 December 2017

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...

Randolph Bruno, Nauro Campos, Saul Estrin and Meng Tian

29 November 2017

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...

Fabrice Defever, Jose-Daniel Reyes, Alejandro Riaño and Miguel Eduardo Sánchez Martin

29 November 2017

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...

Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Matthieu Lequien and Stefanie Stantcheva

24 November 2017

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...

Fabrice Defever, Christian Fischer and Jens Südekum

21 November 2017

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...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart, Peter J. Klenow and Huiyu Li

20 November 2017

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...

Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

16 November 2017

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...

Andrew E. Clark and Tom Lee

15 November 2017

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...

Clément Bosquet, Pierre-Philippe Combes and Cecila Garcia-Peñalosa

14 November 2017

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...

Andrea Ariu, Holger Breinlich, Gregory Corocs and Giordano Mion

9 November 2017

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...

Johannes Boehm, Swati Dhingra and John Morrow

8 November 2017

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...

Hanwei Huang, Jiandong Ju and Vivian Z. Yue

7 November 2017

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...

Laura Alfaro, Pol Antràs, Davin Chor and Paola Conconi

25 October 2017

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...

Alessandro Iaria, Carlo Schwarz and Fabian Waldinger

24 October 2017

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...

Fabrice Defever and Alejandro Riaño

23 October 2017

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...

Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, Ezra Oberfield and Thomas Sampson

17 October 2017

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...

Camille Landais, Arash Nekoei, Peter Nilsson, David Seim and Johannes Spinnewijn

16 October 2017

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...

Swati Dhingra and John Morrow

12 October 2017

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...

Richard Murphy, Judith Scott-Clayton and Gill Wyness

9 October 2017

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

29 September 2017

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...

Thomas Sampson

27 September 2017

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...

Saul Estrin, Daniel Gozman and Susanna Khavul

21 September 2017

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...

Francesco Caselli and Alan Manning

20 September 2017

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Charles I Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb

6 September 2017

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...

Christian Krekel

17 August 2017

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...

Lorenzo Caliendo, Luca David Opromolla, Fernando Parro and Alessandro Sforza

9 August 2017

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...

Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche and Warn N. Lekfuangfu

26 July 2017

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...

Daniel Paravisini, Veronica Rappoport and Philipp Schnabl

24 July 2017

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...

Michael A. Clemens and Jennifer Hunt

19 July 2017

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...

V. Bhaskar, Robin Linacre and Stephen Machin

17 July 2017

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...

Abel Brodeur, Warn N. Lekfuangfu and Yanos Zylberberg

12 July 2017

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...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Patrick Blanchenay and Chiara Criscuolo

22 June 2017

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...

Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Veronica Rappoport, Thomas Sampson and Catherine Thomas

22 June 2017

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...

Christos Genakos, Tommaso Valletti and Frank Verboven

21 June 2017

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...

Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh Powdthavee and George Ward

7 June 2017

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...

Matthew Skellern

30 May 2017

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...

Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman

17 May 2017

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...

David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson and John Van Reenen

Revised June 2019

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...

Irene Sanchez Arjona, Ester Faia and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

25 April 2017

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...

Sascha O. Becker, Thiemo Fetzer and Dennis Novy

24 April 2017

CEP discussion paper

Turbulence, firm decentralization and growth in bad times

What is the optimal form of firm organization during 'bad times'? The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information increases (the 'localist' view). On t...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

21 April 2017

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...

Swati Dhingra, Hanwei Huang, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Joao Paulo Pessoa, Thomas Sampson and John Van Reenen

21 April 2017

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...

Marco Bertoni, Stephen Gibbons and Olmo Silva

21 April 2017

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...

David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson and John Van Reenen

5 April 2017

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...

Ruben Durante, Paolo Pinotti and Andrea Tesei

4 April 2017

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...

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

30 March 2017

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...

Diego Battiston, Jordi Blanes i Vidal and Tom Kirchmaier

30 March 2017

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...

Sarah Flèche

28 March 2017

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...

Ester Faia and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

27 March 2017

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten and John Van Reenen

27 March 2017

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...

Kalina Manova and Zhihong Yu

14 February 2017

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...

Jo Blanden, Kirstine Hansen and Sandra McNally

13 February 2017

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...

Joan Costa-Font and Sarah Flèche

10 February 2017

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...

Jo Blanden and Stephen Machin

31 January 2017

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...

Decio Coviello and Stefano Gagliarducci

26 January 2017

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...

Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

24 January 2017

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...

Claudia Hupkau and Marion Leturcq

23 January 2017

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...

Clément S. Bellet

20 January 2017

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...

Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

13 January 2017

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...

Monica Langella and Alan Manning

14 December 2016

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...

Giordano Mion, Luca David Opromolla and Alessandro Sforza

13 December 2016

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...

Kristian Behrens, Giordano Mion, Yasusada Murata and Jens Südekum

6 December 2016

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...

Tony Beatton, Michael P. Kidd, Stephen Machin and Dipa Sarkar

30 November 2016

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...

Andrew Eyles, Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally

21 November 2016

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...

Rabah Arezki, Thiemo Fetzer and Frank Pisch

1 November 2016

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...

Randolph Bruno, Nauro Campos, Saul Estrin and Meng Tian

24 October 2016

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...

Stephen J. Redding and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

11 October 2016

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...

Elias Einiö

10 October 2016

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...

Marcus Biermann

10 October 2016

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...

Alessandro Gavazza, Simon Mongey and Giovanni L. Violante

4 October 2016

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...

Emmanuel Amissah, Spiros Bougheas, Fabrice Defever and Rod Falvey

20 September 2016

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...

Christian Fons-Rosen, Vincenzo Scrutinio and Katalin Szemeredi

Revised March 2017

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...

Grace Lordan and Jörn-Steffen Pischke

3 August 2016

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...

Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

2 August 2016

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...

Anna Valero and John Van Reenen

Revised October 2017

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...

Marta De Philippis

1 August 2016

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...

Thierry Mayer, Marc J. Melitz and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

28 July 2016

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...

Paul Dolan, Georgios Kavetsos, Christian Krekel, Dimitris Mavridis, Robert Metcalfe, Claudia Senik, Stefan Szymanski and Nicolas R. Ziebarth

26 July 2016

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...

Jörn-Steffen Pischke

21 July 2016

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...

Brian Bell, Simone Pedemonte and John Van Reenen

12 July 2016

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...

Fadi Hassan and Paolo Lucchino

4 July 2016

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...

Evangelia Leda Pateli

24 June 2016

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...

Paul Dolan, Chloe Foy, Georgios Kavetsos and Laura Kudrna

21 June 2016

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...

Andrew B. Bernard, Andreas Moxnes and Yukiko U. Saito

14 June 2016

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...

Zack Cooper, Stephen Gibbons and Matthew Skellern

7 June 2016

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

1 June 2016

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...

Andrew B. Bernard and Toshihiro Okubo

26 May 2016

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...

Fabrice Defever and Alejandro Riaño

19 May 2016

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...

Andrew B. Bernard, Renzo Massari, Jose-Daniel Reyes and Daria Taglioni

9 May 2016

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...

Cletus C. Coughlin and Dennis Novy

6 May 2016

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...

Alan Manning

6 May 2016

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...

Decio Coviello, Andrea Guglielmo and Giancarlo Spagnolo

26 April 2016

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...

Andrew B. Bernard, Andreas Moxnes and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe

26 April 2016

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...

Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo

25 April 2016

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...

Yatang Lin

21 April 2016

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...

Andrew B. Bernard, Valerie Smeets and Frederic Warzynski

12 April 2016

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...

Stefano Gagliarducci and Marco Manacorda

11 April 2016

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...

Jordi Blanes i Vidal and Marc Möller

6 April 2016

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...

Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott

6 April 2016

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...

Marco Manacorda and Andrea Tesei

Revised December 2019

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...

Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralph R. Meisenzahl

17 March 2016

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...

Holger Breinlich, Swati Dhingra and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

16 March 2016

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...

Stefan Bender, Nicholas Bloom, David Card, John Van Reenen and Stefanie Wolter

14 March 2016

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...

Emanuel Ornelas

11 March 2016

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...

Markus K. Brunnermeier, Luis Garicano, Philip R. Lane, Marco Pagano, Ricardo Reis, Tano Santos, David Thesmar, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh and Dimitri Vayanos

11 March 2016

CEP discussion paper

Do tax incentives for research increase firm innovation? An RD design for R&D, patents and spillovers

We present evidence of the positive causal impacts of research and development (R&D) tax incentives on a firm's own innovation and that of its technological neighbors (spillovers). Exploiting a change in the assets-based...Read more...

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Elias Einiö, Ralf Martin, Kieu-Trang Nguyen and John Van Reenen

11 March 2016

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...

Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

8 March 2016

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...

Joao Paulo Pessoa

8 March 2016

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...

Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

24 February 2016

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...

Quoc-Anh Do, Kieu-Trang Nguyen and Anh N. Tran

24 February 2016

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...

Caroline J. Charpentier, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Jonathan P. Roiser and Tali Sharot

23 February 2016

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...

Johannes Boehm, Swati Dhingra and John Morrow

22 February 2016

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...

Felix Koenig, Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo

15 February 2016

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...

Gianluca Benigno and Luca Fornaro

2 February 2016

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...

Brian Bell and Stephen Machin

29 January 2016

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...

Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, Ezra Oberfield and Thomas Sampson

19 January 2016

CEP discussion paper

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish thi...Read more...

Emanuele Forlani, Ralf Martin, Giordano Mion and Mirabelle Muûls

19 January 2016

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...

Holger Breinlich

14 January 2016

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...

Richard V. Burkhauser, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Nattavudh Powdthavee

12 January 2016

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...

Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Thomas K.J. McDermott, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

17 December 2015

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...

Lorenzo Caliendo, Giordano Mion, Luca David Opromolla and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

17 December 2015

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...

Richard Murphy and Gill Wyness

17 December 2015

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...

Zack Cooper, Stuart Craig, Martin Gaynor and John Van Reenen

15 December 2015

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...

Hannes Schwandt and Amelie Wuppermann

14 December 2015

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...

Yatang Lin, Yu Qin and Zhuan Zie

14 December 2015

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...

Robin A. Naylor, Jeremy Smith and Shqiponja Telhaj

26 November 2015

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...

Marc Fleurbaey and Hannes Schwandt

25 November 2015

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...

Benjamin Handel, Jonathan T. Kolstad and Johannes Spinnewijn

23 November 2015

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...

Kilian Huber

23 November 2015

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...

Francesco Caselli, Miklos Koren, Milan Lisicky and Silvana Tenreyro

19 November 2015

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...

Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt

13 November 2015

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...

Marta De Philippis

12 November 2015

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...

Ferdinando Monte, Stephen J. Redding and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

11 November 2015

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...

Tito Boeri and Juan Francisco Jimeno

11 November 2015

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...

Sarah Flèche

10 November 2015

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...

Johannes Boehm

3 November 2015

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...

Andrew B. Bernard and Swati Dhingra

29 October 2015

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...

Andrew E. Clark, Warn N. Lekfuangfu, Nattavudh Powdthavee and George Ward

28 October 2015

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...

Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis

27 October 2015

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...

Holger Breinlich, Volker Nocke and Nicolas Schutz

27 October 2015

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...

Kalina Manova and Zhihong Yu

Revised March 2016

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...

Jordi Blanes i Vidal and Tom Kirchmaier

13 October 2015

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...

Fabrice Defever, Christian Fischer and Jens Südekum

8 October 2015

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...

Brian Bell, Rui Costa and Stephen Machin

1 October 2015

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...

Christos Genakos, Costas Roumanias and Tommaso Valletti

25 September 2015

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...

Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems

21 September 2015

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...

Natalia Ramondo, Veronica Rappoport and Kim J. Ruhl

11 September 2015

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...

Andrew Eyles, Stephen Machin and Olmo Silva

4 September 2015

CEP discussion paper

Consumption smoothing and the welfare cost of uncertainty

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi...Read more...

Yonas Alem and Jonathan Colmer

1 August 2015

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...

Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin

7 August 2015

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...

Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold

1 August 2015

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...

Matthew D. Adler, Paul Dolan and Georgios Kavetsos

1 August 2015

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...

Jeremiah Dittmar

1 August 2015

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...

Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

1 July 2015

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...

Alex Bryson, John Forth and Lucy Stokes

15 July 2015

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...

Joan Costa-Font and Frank A Cowell

14 July 2015

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...

Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Peter Nilsson and Johannes Spinnewijn

8 July 2015

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...

Joan Costa-Font, Martin Karlsson and Henning Oien

25 June 2015

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...

Benjamin Faber, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt

18 June 2015

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...

Esther Ann Bøler, Beata Javorcik and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe

16 June 2015

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...

Michael Amior and Alan Manning

8 June 2015

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...

Sarah Flèche and Richard Layard

3 June 2015

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...

Mirko Draca, Theodore Koutmeridis and Stephen Machin

1 June 2015

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Fatih Guvenen, David J. Price and Jae Song

27 May 2015

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...

Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri and Greg C. Wright

26 May 2015

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...

Jo Blanden, Emilia Del Bono, Sandra McNally and Birgitta Rabe

26 May 2015

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...

David Atkin, Benjamin Faber and Marco Gonzalez-Navarro

15 May 2015

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...

Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy

7 May 2015

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...

Nicholas Oulton

1 May 2015

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...

Gianluca Benigno, Nathan Converse and Luca Fornaro

1 May 2015

CEP discussion paper

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

The UK Jobcentre Plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients (relative to unemployment insurance recipients) into jobs. In the long-run, the policy raised disability exits by 10% a...Read more...

Nitika Bagaria, Felix Koenig, Barbara Petrongolo and John Van Reenen

29 April 2015

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...

Mark Bryan and Alex Bryson

17 April 2015

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...

Eleni Garbi, Christos Genakos and Mario Pagliero

17 April 2015

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...

David Marsden

14 April 2015

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...

George Ward

13 April 2015

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...

Nicholas Oulton and Gavin Wallis

31 March 2015

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...

Camille Terrier

30 March 2015

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...

Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz

25 March 2015

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...

Terence C. Cheng, Joan Costa-Font and Nattavudh Powdthavee

Revised December 2015

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...

Michael Amior

6 March 2015

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...

Antoine Dechezleprêtre and Misato Sato

4 March 2015

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...

Svetoslav Danchev and Christos Genakos

3 March 2015

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...

Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

3 March 2015

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...

Claudia Steinwender

27 February 2015

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...

Javier Ortega and Gregory Verdugo

20 February 2015

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...

David Marsden

19 February 2015

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...

Andrea Tesei

13 February 2015

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...

Andy Feng and Georg Graetz

11 February 2015

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...

Alex Bryson, Andrew E. Clark, Richard B. Freeman and Colin P. Green

11 February 2015

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...

Esther Hauk and Javier Ortega

10 February 2015

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...

Alex Bryson, Rafael Gomez and Tingting Zhang

10 February 2015

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...

Stephan E. Maurer

9 February 2015

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...

Erik Eyster, Kristóf Madarász and Pascal Michaillat

3 February 2015

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...

Joan Costa-Font, Mireia Jofre-Bonet and Julian Le Grand

21 January 2015

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...

Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner and Marco Manacorda

7 January 2015

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...

Réka Juhász

22 December 2014

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...

Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher T. Stanton

19 December 2014

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...

Alan Manning and Amar Shanghavi

18 December 2014

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...

Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher T. Stanton

10 December 2014

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...

Tito Boeri, Pietro Garibaldi and Espen R. Moen

Revised December 2015

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...

Christopher T. Stanton and Catherine Thomas

28 November 2014

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...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio and Simone Ghislandi

21 November 2014

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...

Ghazala Azmat, Caterina Calsamiglia and Nagore Iriberri

Revised October 2015

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...

Saul Estrin, Ute Stephan and Suncica Vujic

13 November 2014

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

3 November 2014

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...

Erling Barth, Alex Bryson, James C. Davis and Richard B. Freeman

3 November 2014

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...

Christos Genakos, Pantelis Koutroumpis and Mario Pagliero

21 October 2014

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...

Filipe Lage de Sousa and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

20 October 2014

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...

William Fuchs, Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

13 October 2014

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...

Alex Bryson and Richard B. Freeman

13 October 2014

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...

Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche and Claudia Senik

8 October 2014

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...

Jorge De la Roca, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Diego Puga

8 October 2014

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...

Femke De Keulenaer, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Georgios Kavetsos, Michael I. Norton, Bert Van Landeghem and George W. Ward

8 October 2014

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...

Holger Breinlich, Anson Soderbery and Greg C. Wright

26 September 2014

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...

Esteban M. Aucejo and Teresa Romano

26 September 2014

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...

Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

23 September 2014

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...

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Ralf Martin and Myra Mohnen

22 September 2014

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...

Stephen Machin and Richard Murphy

22 September 2014

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...

Iain Cockburn, Jean O. Lanjouw and Mark Schankerman

18 September 2014

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...

David W. Johnston, Grace Lordan, Michael A. Shields and Agne Suziedelyte

9 September 2014

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...

Fabio Pinna and Stephan Seiler

8 September 2014

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...

Matt Dickson, Paul Gregg and Harriet Robinson

4 September 2014

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...

Colin Hottman, Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein

3 September 2014

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...

Francesca Cornaglia, Warn N. Lekfuangfu, Nattavudh Powdthavee and Nele Warrinnier

18 August 2014

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...

Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

6 August 2014

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...

John Morrow

4 August 2014

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...

Andreas Georgiadis and Alan Manning

4 August 2014

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...

Francesco Caselli

1 August 2014

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...

Thomas Sampson

1 August 2014

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...

Fabrice Defever and Alejandro Riaño

25 July 2014

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...

Paul Dolan and Matteo M. Galizzi

23 July 2014

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...

Swati Dhingra

15 July 2014

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...

Brian Bell, Anna Bindler and Stephen Machin

14 July 2014

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...

Alex Bryson and Arnaud Chevalier

11 July 2014

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...

Christos Genakos and Tommaso Valletti

4 July 2014

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...

Hannes Schwandt

3 July 2014

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...

Stephan E. Maurer and Andrei V. Potlogea

24 June 2014

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...

Alex Bryson, Petri Böckerman, Christian Hakulinen, Jaakko Pehkonen, Laura Pulkki-Raback, Olli Raitakari and Jutta Viinikainen

20 June 2014

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...

Thiemo Fetzer

15 June 2014

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...

Stephen J. Redding and Matthew A. Turner

15 June 2014

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...

Stephen Hansen, Michael McMahon and Andrea Prat

9 June 2014

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...

Aleksi Aaltonen and Stephan Seiler

9 June 2014

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...

Chiara Criscuolo, Peter N. Gal and Carlo Menon

6 June 2014

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...

Pablo Fajgelbaum and Stephen J. Redding

6 June 2014

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...

Alex Bryson, John Forth and Lucy Stokes

4 June 2014

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...

Alex Bryson and Michael White

4 June 2014

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...

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Cait Lamberton and Michael I. Norton

29 May 2014

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 coun