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Journal articles

Peer-reviewed academic papers by CEP researchers. Where possible, open access to these articles is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

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Solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements

Tito Boeri, Giulia Giupponi, Alan B. Krueger and Stephen Machin look at the changing nature of self-employment in the UK, US and Italy, examining the possible impact of legislation on minimum wages and tax treatment. Read more...
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Product mix and firm productivity responses to trade competition

Thierry Mayer, Marc J. Melitz and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano document how demand shocks in export markets lead French multi-product exporters to re-allocate the mix of products sold in the affected destinations. Read more...

All Journal articles

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
Face-to-Face Communication in Organisations

Communication is integral to organizations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce. We argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that h...Read more...

Diego Battiston, Jordi Blanes i Vidal and Tom Kirchmaier

13 October 2020

Journal article
Journal of Economic Perspectives:
Solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements: a cross-country perspective on the changing composition of jobs

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work a...Read more...

Tito Boeri, Giulia Giupponi, Alan B. Krueger and Stephen Machin

1 October 2020

Journal article
Labour Economics:
Job polarization and the declining quality of knowledge workers: Evidence from the UK and Germany

Across the developed world, employment has polarized clearly by occupation, but changes to the wage structure have been harder to interpret. We examine changes to the wage structure in the UK and Germany, two countries w...Read more...

Chiara Cavaglia and Ben Etheridge

1 October 2020

Journal article
Review of Industrial Organization:
Critically important: the heterogeneous effect of diplomatic tensions on trade

With global value chains interlocking today’s economies, what is the impact of diplomatic tensions on international trade? We exploit variation in monthly data on imports, a measure of imported input use in the domesti...Read more...

Julian Hinz and Elsa Leromain

1 September 2020

Journal article
Economica:
'Trophy architects' and design as rent-seeking: quantifying deadweight losses in a tightly regulated office market

Britain tightly restricts the supply of office space, creating substantial economic rents, but its development restrictions are politically administered and therefore gameable, inducing rent-seeking activity. We find tha...Read more...

Paul Cheshire and Gerard H. Dericks

1 September 2020

Journal article
SERIEs:
Job loss at home: children's school performance during the Great Recession

This paper studies the intergenerational impact of parental job loss on school performance during the Great Recession in Spain. Collecting data through parental surveys in a school in the province of Barcelona, I obtain ...Read more...

Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

1 September 2020

Journal article
The Review of Economics and Statistics:
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, French firms skew their export sal...Read more...

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

1 August 2020

Journal article
Fiscal Studies:
Devolving skills: the case of the apprenticeship grant for employers

One rationale for devolution is that local decision makers may be well placed to adapt national policies to the local context. We test whether such adaptation helps meet programme objectives in the case of the Apprentice...Read more...

Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Henry Overman

1 August 2020

Journal article
Education Economics:
Minority report: the impact of predicted grades on university admissions of disadvantaged groups

We study the UK's university application system, in which students apply based on predicted examination grades, rather than actual results. Using three years of UK university applications data we find that only 16% of ap...Read more...

Richard Murphy and Gill Wyness

3 July 2020

Journal article
European Journal of Finance:
Is firm-level clean or dirty innovation valued more?

We examine how Tobin's Q is linked to 'clean' and 'dirty' innovation and innovation efficiency at the firm level. Clean innovation relates to patented technologies in areas such as renewable energy generation and electri...Read more...

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Cal B. Muckley and Parvati Neelakantan

2 July 2020

Journal article
Regional Science and Urban Economics:
The effects of supporting local business: evidence from the UK

This paper assesses the effects of a significant place-based intervention that targeted local businesses in deprived areas in the UK. To gain identification, we use data at a fine spatial scale and a regression discontin...Read more...

Elias Einiö and Henry Overman

1 July 2020

Journal article
Journal of Urban Economics:
On the economic impacts of constraining second home investments

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

Christian Hilber and Olivier Schöni

1 July 2020

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
Entry through the narrow door: the costs of just failing high stakes exams

In many countries, important thresholds in examinations act as a gateway to higher levels of education and/or improved employment prospects. This paper examines the consequences of just failing a particularly important h...Read more...

Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

1 July 2020

Journal article
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:
Comments on "labor market trends and the changing value of time"

The last century was characterized by a well-documented marked increase in income inequality in the US (see Alvaredo et al., 2018, among many others), which fostered a vast debate among academics and policy makers about ...Read more...

Francesca Carta and Marta De Philippis

1 June 2020

Journal article
Journal of Economic Perspectives:
Place-based policies and spatial disparities across European cities

Spatial disparities in income and worklessness across areas of the European Union are profound and persistent. Concerns about these disparities and the appropriate policy response are longstanding. Two trends have re-ene...Read more...

Maximilian v. Ehrlich and Henry Overman

1 June 2020

Journal article
Journal of Urban Economics:
The role of demand in land re-development

Vacant, previously-developed land in cities can generate negative externalities on surrounding areas, and is often the target of policies to promote re-development. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity ...Read more...

Felipe Carozzi

1 May 2020

Journal article
The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization:
In-house and arms length: productivity heterogeneity and variation in organizational form

This paper analyzes firm boundaries in the US hotel industry. Hotel properties of a given brand are often managed either by a chain employee or by a franchisee. We document that brand properties with the lowest and the h...Read more...

Arturs Kalnins, Stephen F. Lin and Catherine Thomas

1 May 2020

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Skill-biased management: evidence from manufacturing firms

This article 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 c...Read more...

Andy Feng and Anna Valero

1 May 2020

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
The making of the modern metropolis: evidence from London

Using newly constructed spatially disaggregated data for London from 1801 to 1921, we show that the invention of the steam railway led to the first large-scale separation of workplace and residence. We show that a class ...Read more...

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

1 May 2020

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
Top of the class: the importance of ordinal rank

This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on ...Read more...

Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt

1 May 2020

Journal article
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics:
Do apprenticeships pay? Evidence for England

The importance of apprenticeships for early labour market transitions varies across countries and over time. In recent times, there has been a policy drive to increase the number of people undertaking apprenticeships in ...Read more...

Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura

1 April 2020

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
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

1 April 2020

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
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

1 February 2020

Journal article
Labour Economics:
Intergenerational effects of employment protection reforms

Job insecurity has worsened in most OECD countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Labour Force Survey data, I estimate the link between parental job insecurity (as measured by the contract type held by pa...Read more...

Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

1 January 2020

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Autonomous Schools and Strategic Pupil Exclusion

This paper studies whether pupil performance gains in autonomous schools in England can be attributed to the strategic exclusion of poorly performing pupils. England has had two phases of academy school introduction, the...Read more...

Stephen Machin and Matteo Sandi

1 January 2020

Journal article
Journal of Urban Economics:
Does investment in national highways help or hurt hinterland city growth?

We investigate the effects of the recently constructed Chinese national highway system on local economic outcomes. On average, roads that improve access to local markets have small or negative effects on prefecture econo...Read more...

Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Loren Brandt, J. Vernon Henderson, Matthew A. Turner and Qinghua Zhang

1 January 2020

Journal article
Fiscal Studies:
Have R&D Spillovers Declined in the 21st Century?

Slow growth over the last decade has prompted policy attention towards increasing R&D spending, often via the tax system. We examine the impact of R&D on firm performance, both by the firm's own investments and through p...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking and John Van Reenen

1 December 2019

Journal article
Fiscal Studies:
Financing Local Police Spending in England and Wales: Fiscal Federalism in Practice

Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have been able to raise revenues locally to supplement grants from central government. We analyse the variation across police force areas in locally raised police revenues o...Read more...

Rowena Crawford, Richard Disney and Polly Simpson

1 December 2019

Journal article
Economic Journal:
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 exits off disability bene...Read more...

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

1 November 2019

Journal article
Economics of Transportation:
Quantifying Wider Economic Impacts of agglomeration for transport appraisal: Existing evidence and future directions

The Authors 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 agglomerati...Read more...

Daniel J. Graham and Stephen Gibbons

1 September 2019

Journal article
Journal of International Economics:
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

1 September 2019

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
The introduction of academy schools to England's education

This paper studies the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past in advanced countries�the introduction of academy schools to English educat...Read more...

Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin

1 August 2019

Journal article
Journal of Economic Perspectives:
A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation

Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to underprovide innovation because of the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the United States and other advanced economies supports this id...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and Heidi Williams

1 August 2019

Journal article
Economics of Education Review:
The end of free college in England: Implications for enrolments, equity, and quality

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

1 August 2019

Journal article
Journal of Political Economy:
CEO Behavior and Firm Performance

We measure the behavior of over 1,100 CEOs in six countries (Brazil, France, Germany, India, UK and US) using a new methodology that combines (i) a survey measuring each activity undertaken in a random work-week by the e...Read more...

Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

3 July 2019

Journal article
Economica:
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 and Jose-Daniel Reyes

1 July 2019

Journal article
Economic Policy:
Zero Hours Contracts and Labour Market Policy

The evolving nature of atypical work arrangements is studied. A particular focus is placed on one such form of work relation: zero hour contracts (ZHCs). The paper uses existing secondary data and new survey data collect...Read more...

Nikhil Datta, Giulia Giupponi and Stephen Machin

28 June 2019

Journal article
The Review of Economics and Statistics:
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 closer to univers...Read more...

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

26 June 2019

Journal article
Journal of Regional Science:
Direct democracy and intergenerational conflicts in ageing societies

To evaluate the potential effects of population ageing on the outcomes of direct democracy, we analyze the effect of age on voting decisions in public referendums. In a case study of the Stuttgart 21 referendum on one of...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Wolfgang Maennig and Malte Steenbeck

6 June 2019

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
Joseph Schumpeter Lecture, EEA Annual Congress 2017: Do Tax Cuts Produce more Einsteins? The Impacts of Financial Incentives VerSus 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

1 June 2019

Journal article
American Economic Review:
The effect of house prices on household borrowing: A new approach

We investigate the effect of house prices on household borrowing using administrative mortgage data from the United Kingdom and a new empirical approach. The data contain household-level information on house prices and b...Read more...

James Cloyne, Kilian Huber, Ethan Ilzetzki and Henrik Kleven

1 June 2019

Journal article
Labour Economics:
Teaching assistants, computers and classroom management

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 how resources may be used within classrooms to rei...Read more...

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

1 June 2019

Journal article
Review of Income and Wealth:
Neighbors' Income, Public Goods, and Well-Being

Read more...

Abel Brodeur and Sarah Flèche

1 June 2019

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
The changing returns to crime: do criminals respond to prices?

To what extent does crime follow the pattern of potential gains to illegal activity? This article presents evidence on how criminals respond to this key incentive by reporting crime-price elasticities estimated from a co...Read more...

Mirko Draca, Theodore Koutmeridis and Stephen Machin

1 May 2019

Journal article
Review of World Economics:
Are all trade agreements equal? The role of distance in shaping the effect of economic integration agreements on trade flows

How does geographic distance affect the impact of trade agreements on bilateral exports, and through what channels? This paper examines this questions in a gravity model context for different types of goods for 185 count...Read more...

Rebecca Freeman and Samuel Pienknagura

1 May 2019

Journal article
Journal of Urban Economics:
The economic effects of density: A synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 347 estimates of density elasticities of a broad range of outcomes ranging from wages, innovation, rents, various amenities, t...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Elisabetta Pietrostefani

1 May 2019

Journal article
Journal of Business and Economic Statistics:
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 e.g. instrumental variables or differences-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the righ...Read more...

Zhuan Pei, Jörn-Steffen Pischke and Hannes Schwandt

3 April 2019

Journal article
SSM - Population Health:
Crime victimisation over time and sleep quality

We here consider the relationship between the individual time profile of crime victimisation and sleep quality. Sleep quality worsens with contemporaneous crime victimisation, with physical violence having a larger effec...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio and Rong Zhu

1 April 2019

Journal article
Journal of Comparative Economics:
How history matters for student performance. lessons from the Partitions of Poland

This paper examines the effect on current student performance of the 19th century Partitions of Poland among Austria, Prussia and Russia. Using a regression discontinuity design, I show that student test scores are 0.6 s...Read more...

Pawel Bukowski

1 March 2019

Journal article
Journal of Economic Geography:
Spatial Imaginaries and Tech Cities: Place-branding East London's digital economy

We explore place branding as an economic development strategy for technology clusters, using London’s ‘Tech City’ initiative as a case study. We site place branding in a larger family of policies that develop spatial ima...Read more...

Max Nathan, Emma Vandore and Georgina Voss

1 March 2019

Journal article
Journal of Economic Geography:
The preservation of historic districts - Is it worth it?

Read more...

Sevrin Waights

1 March 2019

Journal article
International Journal of Industrial Organization:
Flex cars and competition in fuel retail markets

We study how the diffusion of flex (bi-fuel) cars affected competition on ethanol and gasoline retail markets. We propose a model of price competition in which the two fuels become closer substitutes as flex cars penetra...Read more...

Juliano Assuncao, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Leonardo Rezende

1 March 2019

Journal article
Review of Economic Studies:
Carry-along trade

Large multi-product firms dominate international trade flows. This paper documents new facts about multi-product manufacturing exporters that are not easily reconciled with existing multi-product models. Using novel link...Read more...

Andrew B. Bernard, Emily Blanchard, Ilke Van Beveren and Hylke Vandenbussche

1 March 2019

Journal article
Journal of Urban Economics:
New road infrastructure: The effects on firms

This paper estimates the impact of new road infrastructure on employment and labour productivity using firm level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured through changes in accessibi...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Teemu Lyytikäinen, Henry G. Overman and Rosa Sanchis-Guarner

1 March 2019

Journal article
Economics of Education Review:
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

1 February 2019

Journal article
Health Affairs:
Hospital prices grew substantially faster than physician prices for hospital-based care in 2007-14

Evidence suggests that growth in providers' prices drives growth in health care spending on the privately insured. However, existing work has not systematically differentiated between the growth rate of hospital prices a...Read more...

Zack Cooper, Stuart Craig, Martin Gaynor, Nir J. Harish, Harlan M. Krumholz and John Van Reenen

1 February 2019

Journal article
Quantitative Economics:
Incidence, salience, and spillovers: the direct and indirect effects of tax credits on wages

Tax credits are a popular way to alleviate in-work poverty. A common empirical assumption is that the benefit of the tax credit is borne solely by the claimant workers. However, economic theory suggests no particular rea...Read more...

Ghazala Azmat

1 February 2019

Journal article
Health Affairs:
Variation in health spending growth for the privately insured from 2007 to 2014

We examined the growth in health spending on people with employer-sponsored private insurance in the period 2007-14. Our analysis relied on information from the Health Care Cost Institute data set, which includes insuran...Read more...

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

1 February 2019

Journal article
Travail et Emploi:
Polarization(s) in Labour Markets: Synthesis and Perspectives

Polarization is now well established and documented. The increase in the share of high-wage and low-wage jobs at the expense of "intermediate" jobs has led to a polarization of jobs in the US (Autor, 2010; Autor, Dorn, 2...Read more...

Alan Manning

1 January 2019

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Some causal effects of an industrial policy

We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a program to support jobs through investment subsidies. European rules determine whether an area is eligible for subsidies, and we construct instrumental v...Read more...

Chiara Criscuolo, Ralf Martin, Henry G. Overman and John Van Reenen

1 January 2019

Journal article
Regional Science and Urban Economics:
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 cost of these subsidies ...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Maria Sanchez-Vidal and Olmo Silva

15 December 2018

Journal article
Economics of Education Review:
The threat of competition and public school performance: Evidence from Poland

Theoretical literature on whether school competition raises public school productivity is ambiguous (e.g. MacLeod & Urquiola, 2015) and empirical evidence is mixed (e.g. Hsieh and Urquiola, 2006). Moreover, competition m...Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Martyna Kobus

1 December 2018

Journal article
Fiscal Studies:
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 theEuropean Union on the UK economy. Our results suggest that initial sto...Read more...

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

1 December 2018

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
The impact of trade agreements on consumerwelfare-evidence from the EU common external trade policy

This paper estimates the consumer welfare impact of the new generation of trade agreements implemented by the European Union between 1993 and 2013. We decompose the overall effect into contributions of changes in prices,...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Holger Breinlich and Swati Dhingra

1 December 2018

Journal article
Fiscal Studies:
Off EU Go? Brexit, the UK Labour Market and Immigration

Immigration remains a highly antagonistic issue and its purported effects in the labour market are still contestable. Against this background, the UK looks set to undertake a large overhaul of its immigration policy foll...Read more...

Jonathan Wadsworth

1 December 2018

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Robots at work

We analyze for the first time the economic contributions of modern industrial robots, which are flexible, versatile, and autonomous machines. We use novel panel data on robot adoption within industries in seventeen count...Read more...

Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

1 December 2018

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Tall buildings and land values: Height and construction cost elasticities in Chicago, 1870-2010

Despite unprecedented vertical growth in large cities, the economics of skyscrapers remain understudied. We combine data on tall buildings with a panel of land prices covering 140 years to analyze the determinants of urb...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Daniel P. McMillen

1 December 2018

Journal article
Review of International Economics:
Globalization and urban polarization

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

5 November 2018

Journal article
Quarterly Journal of Economics:
Religious competition and reallocation: The political economy of secularization in the protestant reformation

Using novel microdata, we document an important, unintended consequence ofthe Protestant Reformation: a reallocation ofresources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual fra...Read more...

Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman

1 November 2018

Journal article
Economics Letters:
The regional effects of Germany's national minimum wage

We show that the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015 led to spatial wage convergence, in particular in the left tail of the distribution, without reducing relative employment in low-wage regions within the first t...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Duncan Roth

1 November 2018

Journal article
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:
From selling goods to selling services: Firm responses to trade liberalization

In this paper, we focus on a new channel of adaptation to trade liberalization , namely the shift toward increased provision of services in lieu of goods production. We exploit variation in European Union trade policy to...Read more...

Holger Breinlich, Anson Soderbery and Greg C. Wright

1 November 2018

Journal article
Economica:
Leveraging Monopoly Power by Degrading Interoperability: Theory and Evidence from Computer Markets

When will a monopolist have incentives to leverage her/his market power in a primary market to foreclose competition in a complementary market by degrading compatibility/interoperability of her/his products with those of...Read more...

Christos Genakos, Kai Uwe Kühn and John Van Reenen

1 October 2018

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
Does additional spending help urban schools? An evaluation using boundary discontinuities

This study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in England to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas. Anomalies arise because the funding allocated to Local E...Read more...

Steve Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo

1 October 2018

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
Does competition from private surgical centres improve public hospitals’ performance? Evidence from the English National Health Service

This paper examines the impact of a government programme which facilitated the entry of for-profit surgical centres to compete against incumbent National Health Service hospitals in England. We examine the impact of comp...Read more...

Zack Cooper, Stephen Gibbons and Matthew Skellern

1 October 2018

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
Firm dynamics and residual inequality in open economies

Wage inequality between similar workers has been on the rise in many rich countries. Recent empirical research suggests that heterogeneity in firm characteristics is crucial to understand wage dispersion. Lower trade cos...Read more...

Gabriel Felbermayr, Giammario Impullitti and Julien Prat

1 October 2018

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
Does additional spending help urban schools? An evaluation using boundary discontinuities

This study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in England to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas. Anomalies arise because the funding allocated to Local E...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo

1 October 2018

Journal article
Economic Policy:
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

1 October 2018

Journal article
Journal of International Economics:
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

1 September 2018

Journal article
Annual Review of Economics:
The Development of the African System of Cities

Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced high urban population growth over the past half century, dramatically reshaping the economic and spatial profile of the region. Simultaneously, this process has challenged the conventio...Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson and Sebastian Kriticos

2 August 2018

Journal article
Annual Review of Economics:
Networks and Trade

Trade occurs between firms both across borders and within countries, and most trade transactions include at least one large firm with many trading partners. This article reviews the literature on firm-to-firm connections...Read more...

Andrew B. Bernard and Andreas Moxnes

2 August 2018

Journal article
American Economic Review:
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

1 August 2018

Journal article
National Institute Economic Review:
Broken Market or Broken Policy? The Unintended Consequences of Restrictive Planning

This paper summarises the evidence from recent research relating to the British Planning system's impact on the supply of development. Planning serves important economic and social purposes but it is essential to disting...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

1 August 2018

Journal article
Industrial and Corporate Change:
A cross-country analysis of start-up employment dynamics

This article carries out a detailed descriptive analysis of employment dynamics of new firms, using comparable and highly representative data for 19 countries. It does so by using a novel analytical decomposition of the ...Read more...

Flavio Calvino, Chiara Criscuolo and Carlo Menon

1 August 2018

Journal article
Social Science and Medicine:
Life satisfaction, QALYs, and the monetary value of health

The monetary value of a quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is frequently used to assess the benefits of health interventions and inform funding decisions. However, there is little consensus on methods for the estimation o...Read more...

Li Huang, Paul Frijters, Kim Dalziel and Philip Clarke

1 August 2018

Journal article
International Economics:
Relaxing credit constraints in emerging economies: The impact of public loans on the productivity of Brazilian manufacturers

In emerging economies credit constraints are often perceived as one of the most important market frictions hampering firm productivity growth in manufacturing. Huge amount of public money is devoted to the removal of suc...Read more...

Filipe Lage de Sousa and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

1 August 2018

Journal article
Journal of Economic Geography:
Intended versus unintended consequences of migration restriction policies: Evidence from a natural experiment in Indonesia

This article studies the consequences of restrictions to migration at the origin on labor market outcomes and school enrolment in origin communities. Our difference-indifferences specification exploits the differential i...Read more...

Mattia Makovec, Ririn S. Purnamasari, Matteo Sandi and Astrid R. Savitri

1 July 2018

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
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

1 July 2018

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Two-sided heterogeneity and trade

This paper develops a multicountry model of international trade that provides a simple microfoundation for buyer-seller relationships in trade. We explore a rich data set that identifies buyers and sellers in trade and e...Read more...

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

1 July 2018

Journal article
Economica:
Wage Flexibility and Employment Fluctuations: Evidence from the Housing Sector

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

Jörn-Steffen Pischke

1 July 2018

Journal article
American Economic Review:
The persistence of local joblessness

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. Thes...Read more...

Michael Amior and Alan Manning

1 July 2018

Journal article
Journal of Economic History:
A Dissection of Trading Capital: Trade in the Aftermath of the Fall of the Iron Curtain

We study trade in Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another after 1989 than predicted by a standard gravity m...Read more...

Matthias Beestermöller and Ferdinand Rauch

29 June 2018

Journal article
Renewal:
‘The Everyday Economy’ and the next economic settlement

Review of Rachel Reeves, The Everyday Economy, 2018, https://www.scribd.com/document/374425087/Rachel-Reeves-TheEveryday-Economy...Read more...

Dan Chandler

15 June 2018

Journal article
CESifo Economic Studies:
Take me to the Centre of your Town! Using micro-geographical data to identify Town Centres

© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute, Munich. All rights reserved. We often talk about 'Town Centres' (TCs), but defining their location and extent is surprisingly difficu...Read more...

Paul Cheshire, Christian Hilber, Piero Montebruno and Rosa Sanchis-Guarner

1 June 2018

Journal article
Labour Economics:
Larrikin youth: Crime and Queensland's Earning or Learning reform

This paper analyses the impact of the introduction of an Earning or Learning reform on youth crime in Queensland, Australia. The 2006 reform increased learning and reduced earning as school participation rose post-reform...Read more...

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

1 June 2018

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
The limits of political compromise: Debt ceilings and political turnover

We study the desirability of limits on the public debt and of political turnover in an economy where incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimal level due to rent-seeking motives. P...Read more...

Alexandre B. Cunha and Emanuel Ornelas

1 June 2018

Journal article
Journal of Economic Literature:
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

1 June 2018

Journal article
CESifo Economic Studies:
Weights to address non-parallel trends in panel difference-in-differences models

Causal inference using the difference-in-differences (DD) method relies on the untestable assumption of parallel counterfactual trends across units that are assigned to different treatments. To facilitate the application...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt

1 June 2018

Journal article
AEA Papers and Proceedings:
Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners?

Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husba...Read more...

Sarah Flèche, Anthony Lepinteur and Nattavudh Powdthavee

1 May 2018

Journal article
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:
Changing how literacy is taught: evidence on synthetic phonics

A significant number of people have very low levels of literacy in many OECD countries. This paper studies a national change in policy and practice in England that refocused the teaching of reading around "synthetic phon...Read more...

Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo

1 May 2018

Journal article
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:
A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Applications

Read more...

Camille Landais, Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez

1 May 2018

Journal article
Journal of International Economics:
The buyer margins of firms’ exports

We use detailed data on exporters from Costa Rica, Ecuador and Uruguay as well as on their buyers to show that: aggregate exports are disproportionally driven by few multi-buyers exporters; and each multi-buyer exporter'...Read more...

Jerónimo Carballo, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Christian Volpe Martincus

1 May 2018

Journal article
AEA Papers and Proceedings:
A Dialogue between a Populist and an Economist

In this imaginary dialogue, a populist and an economist discuss the role of economic shocks to explain populism. A simple correlation between economic shocks and populism is weak. However, economic shocks can explain wel...Read more...

1 May 2018

Journal article
Quarterly Journal of Economics:
Transparency and deliberation within the FOMC: A computational linguistics approach

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect monetary policy makers' deliberations? Theory predicts a positive discipline effect and negative conformity effect. We empirically explore these effects...Read more...

Stephen Hansen, Michael McMahon and Andrea Prat

1 May 2018

Journal article
Economic Journal:
Nation-building through compulsory schooling during the age of mass migration

Why did America introduce compulsory schooling laws at a time when financial investments in education and voluntary school attendance were high? We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that states adopted compul...Read more...

Oriana Bandiera, Myra Mohnen, Imran Rasul and Martina Viarengo

20 April 2018

Journal article
Review of Income and Wealth:
Four decades of the economics of happiness: Where next?

There has been explosive growth in the analysis of subjective well-being in Economics over the past 40 years. This article reviews some of this growth, and suggests a number of domains in which future research may procee...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark

1 April 2018

Journal article
Labour Economics:
Unfairness at work: Well-being and quits

We here consider the effect of the level of income that individuals consider to be fair for the job they do, which we take as measure of comparison income, on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting....Read more...

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

1 April 2018

Journal article
Journal of Consumer Psychology:
The Power of Voice in Stimulating Morality: Eliciting Taxpayer Preferences Increases Tax Compliance

Decisions about paying taxes represent one of the most common moral quandaries faced by citizens. In the present research, we argue that taxpayer compliance can be raised by increasing "voice": allowing taxpayers to expr...Read more...

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

1 April 2018

Journal article
Social science & medicine:
Ownership and hospital behaviour: Employment and local unemployment

In this paper, we address two issues: i) how hospital employment changes with local unemployment, according to the type of hospital ownership, and ii) whether this relationship changed after the implementation of a pro-c...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark and Carine Milcent

1 April 2018

Journal article
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:
Growth volatility and size: A firm-level study

This paper provides a systematic cross-country investigation of the relation between a firm's growth volatility and its size. For the first time the analysis is carried out using comparable and representative sets of dat...Read more...

Flavio Calvino, Chiara Criscuolo, Carlo Menon and Angelo Secchi

1 April 2018

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
The effect of police response time on crime clearance rates

Police agencies devote vast resources to minimizing 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

1 April 2018

Journal article
Scandinavian Journal of Economics:
Gender and Promotions: Evidence from Academic Economists in France

Differences in promotion across genders are still prevalent in many occupations. Recent work based on experimental evidence indicates that women participate less in or exert lower effort during contests. We exploit the u...Read more...

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

12 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health:
Social tenants' health: Evaluating the effectiveness of landlord interventions

Background: The National Health Service (NHS) scores well internationally on access to healthcare. But access has been measured on methods likely to undersample the more disadvantaged. Social landlords have access to mor...Read more...

Paul Cheshire, Stephen Gibbons and Jemma Mouland

8 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of International Economics:
Immigration, trade and productivity in services: Evidence from U.K. 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

6 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of Industrial Economics:
Firm Productivity Differences From Factor Markets

We model firm adaptation to local factor markets in which firms care about both the price and availability of inputs. The model is estimated by combining firm and population census data, and quantifies the role of factor...Read more...

Wenya Cheng and John Morrow

1 March 2018

Journal article
Regional Science and Urban Economics:
You've come a long way, baby. Husbands’ commuting time and family labour supply

This paper explores the effects of husbands’ commuting time on wives’ employment and family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model, and we show that when market services are imperfect substitutes of home prod...Read more...

Marta De Philippis

1 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of International Economics:
Working across time zones: Exporters and the gender wage gap

This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the gender wage gap (GWG) between exporting firms and non-exporters. Exporters may require greater commitment from their employees, such as working particular ho...Read more...

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

1 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of World Business:
Emerging Economy MNEs: How does home country munificence matter?

Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) from emerging economies (EEs) are establishing operations in advanced economies (AEs), apparently departing from traditional models of internationalization. We explore an under-explored d...Read more...

Saul Estrin, Klaus E. Meyer and Adeline Pelletier

1 March 2018

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Disentangling the effects of a banking crisis: Evidence from German firms and counties

Lending cuts by banks directly affect the firms borrowing from them, but also indirectly depress economic activity in the regions in which they operate. This paper moves beyond firm-level studies by estimating the effect...Read more...

Kilian Huber

1 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of Economic History:
Voting behavior and public employment in Nazi Germany

This article analyzes whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after coming to power in 1933. Using newly-collected data on public employment from the German censuses in 1925, ...Read more...

Stephan E. Maurer

1 March 2018

Journal article
AEA Papers and Proceedings:
The Productivity-Wage Premium: Does Size Still Matter in a Service Economy?

The literature has established two robust stylized facts: (i) the existence of a firm size-wage premium and (ii) a positive relationship between firm size and productivity. However, the existing evidence is mainly based ...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris and Chiara Criscuolo

1 March 2018

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Real effects of information frictions: When the states and the Kingdom Became United

How do information frictions distort international trade? This paper exploits a unique historical experiment to estimate the magnitude of these distortions: the establishment of the transatlantic telegraph connection in ...Read more...

Claudia Steinwender

1 March 2018

Journal article
Fiscal Studies:
Academies 2 - the new batch: the changing nature of academy schools in England

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

Andrew Eyles, Stephen Machin and Olmo Silva

1 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:
Identity, non-take-up and welfare conditionality

We study a model in which poor individuals of different types request a service and may suffer from the discrepancy between the service provider's beliefs and their true type. The utility loss resulting from such a discr...Read more...

Claudia Hupkau and François Maniquet

1 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of Economic Geography:
From periphery to core: Measuring agglomeration effects using high-speed rail

We analyze the economic impact of the German high-speed rail (HSR) connecting Cologne and Frankfurt, which provides plausibly exogenous variation in access to surrounding economic mass. We find a causal effect of about 8...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Arne Feddersen

1 March 2018

Journal article
Papers in Regional Science:
UK trade and FDI: A post-Brexit perspective

Leaving the EU will reshape the UK's economic relations with the rest of the world. This paper summarizes the findings of recent research studying the UK's role in the global economy, and the consequences of Brexit for U...Read more...

Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano, Veronica Rappoport, Thomas Sampson and Catherine Thomas

1 March 2018

Journal article
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society:
‘Making it count’: incentives, student effort and performance

The paper examines how incentives to participate in on-line assessments (quizzes) affect students' effort and performance. Our identification strategy exploits within-student weekly variation in incentives to attempt on-...Read more...

Arnaud Chevalier, Peter Dolton and Melanie Lührmann

1 February 2018

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012

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

Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

1 February 2018

Journal article
Economics of Education Review:
Smart but unhappy: Independent-school competition and the wellbeing-efficiency trade-off in education

We study whether independent-school competition involves a trade-off between pupil wellbeing and academic performance. To test this hypothesis, we analyse data covering pupils across the OECD, exploiting historical Catho...Read more...

Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren

1 February 2018

Journal article
Quarterly Journal of Economics:
The global distribution of economic activity: nature, history, and the role of trade

We explore the role of natural characteristics in determining the worldwide spatial distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, observed across 240,000 grid cells. A parsimonious set of 24 physical ...Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson, Tim Squires, Adam Storeygard and David Weil

1 February 2018

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
Empty homes, longer commutes: The unintended consequences of more restrictive local planning

We investigate the impact of land use regulation on housing vacancy rates. Using a 30-year panel dataset on land use regulation for 350 English Local Authorities (LAs) and addressing potential reverse causation and other...Read more...

Paul Cheshire, Christian Hilber and Hans R. A. Koster

1 February 2018

Journal article
Economic Journal:
Trade, Firm Selection and Innovation: The Competition Channel

We study the welfare gains from trade in an economy with heterogeneous firms, variable markups and endogenous growth. Variable markups arise from oligopolistic competition, and cost-reducing innovation is the engine of l...Read more...

Giammario Impullitti and Omar Licandro

1 February 2018

Journal article
Economic Journal:
Distinctively Different: A New Approach to Valuing Architectural Amenities

We propose a method to estimate the capitalised value of the architectural design quality of an area. Our economic design premium is identified by spatially differentiating property prices and design quality within neigh...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Nancy Holman

1 February 2018

Journal article
American Journal of Health Economics:
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 the utilization of health-care services, and the choice between private and public health care in the United Kingdom. Our ...Read more...

Terence C. Cheng, Joan Costa Font and Nattavudh Powdthavee

23 January 2018

Journal article
European Journal of Political Economy:
Electoral incentives, term limits, and the sustainability of peace

One of the few stylized facts in international relations is that democracies, unlike autocracies, almost never fight each other. Recent empirical findings show that binding term limits invalidate this result: democratic ...Read more...

Paola Conconi, Nicolas Sahuguet and Maurizio Zanardi

1 January 2018

Journal article
Journal of Labor Economics:
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

1 January 2018

Journal article
Foreign Affairs:
The Truth About the Minimum Wage: Neither Job Killer Nor Cure-All

It has been more than eight years since many of the United States’ cashiers, dishwashers, janitors, lifeguards, baggage handlers, baristas, manicurists, retail employees, housekeepers, construction laborers, home health ...Read more...

Alan Manning

1 January 2018

Journal article
Economics of Education Review:
A question of degree: The effects of degree class on labor market outcomes

How does performance at university affect labor market outcomes? Employing a regression discontinuity design, we show that university degree class causally affects graduates’ industry, wages, and earnings. Our sample c...Read more...

Andy Feng and Georg Graetz

1 December 2017

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

By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fer...Read more...

Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

1 December 2017

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
Unexpected school reform: academisation of primary schools in England

The UK 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 co...Read more...

Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin

1 November 2017

Journal article
National Institute Economic Review:
Local economic effects of Brexit

This paper studies local economic impacts of the increases in trade barriers associated with Brexit. Predictions of the local impact of Brexit are presented under two different scenarios, soft and hard Brexit, which are ...Read more...

Swati Dhingra, Stephen Machin and Henry G. Overman

31 October 2017

Journal article
Journal of Political Economy:
Gender gaps in performance: Evidence from young lawyers

This paper documents the gender gap in performance among highskilled professionals in the United States. On the basis of widely used performance measures in law firms, we find that male lawyers bill 10 percent more hours...Read more...

Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer

1 October 2017

Journal article
Economic Policy:
The costs and benefits of leaving the EU: trade effects

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

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

1 October 2017

Journal article
Journal of Economic Perspectives:
Brexit: the economics of international disintegration

On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on its membership in the European Union. Although most of Britain's establishment backed remaining in the European Union, 52 percent of voters disagreed and handed a...Read more...

Thomas Sampson

1 October 2017

Journal article
American Economic Review:
How Local Are Labor Markets? Evidence from a Spatial Job Search Model

This paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets. Our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas, while preserving tractability. We estimate t...Read more...

Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo

1 October 2017

Journal article
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics:
Gender gaps and the rise of the service economy

This paper investigates the role of the rise in services in the narrowing of gender gaps in hours and wages in recent decades. We highlight the between-industry component of differential gender trends for the United Stat...Read more...

L. Rachel Ngai and Barbara Petrongolo

1 October 2017

Journal article
Harvard Business Review:
Why do we undervalue competent management?

Business schools teach MBA students that you can't compete on the basis of management processes because they're easily copied. Operational effectiveness is table stakes in the competitive universe, according to the strat...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

1 September 2017

Journal article
Journal of Technology Transfer:
Academic inventors: collaboration and proximity with industry

This paper addresses a number of fundamental research questions on university-industry (U-I) collaborations. Are U-I collaborations intrinsically different from other forms of collaboration, such as inter-firm or inter-u...Read more...

Riccardo Crescenzi, Andrea Filippetti and Simona Iammarino

1 August 2017

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Roads, railroads, and decentralization of Chinese cities

We investigate how urban railroad and highway configurations have influenced urban form in Chinese cities since 1990. Each radial highway displaces 4% of central city population to surrounding regions, and ring roads dis...Read more...

Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Loren Brandt, Vernon Henderson, Matthew A. Turner and Qinghua Zhang

1 July 2017

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Adjusting Your Dreams? High School Plans and Dropout Behaviour

At the end of middle school, many low-achieving students realise that they do not have the ability to get into selective high school programmes, which may be a source of disengagement and eventually lead them to drop out...Read more...

Dominique Goux, Marc Gurgand and Eric Maurin

1 June 2017

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Is modern technology responsible for jobless recoveries?

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. W...Read more...

Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

1 May 2017

Journal article
The Scandinavian Journal of Economics:
A Characteristics Approach to Optimal Taxation: Line Drawing and Tax-Driven Product Innovation

Real-world tax legislation assigns goods to different categories of tax rates on the basis of observable characteristics, allowing the tax system to handle a constantly evolving set of available goods. We recast the theo...Read more...

Christian Gillitzer, Henrik Kleven and Joel Slemrod

1 April 2017

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Heterogeneous agglomeration

Many prior treatments of agglomeration explicitly or implicitly assume that all industries agglomerate for the same reasons. This paper uses U.K. establishment-level coagglomeration data to document substantial heterogen...Read more...

Giulia Faggio, Olmo Silva and William C. Strange

1 March 2017

Journal article
Oxford Review of Economic Policy:
A hitch-hiker's guide to post-Brexit trade negotiations: Options and principles

Brexit will require the UK to negotiate new trade arrangements with the EU. After summarizing the main options for future UK-EU trade relations, this article reviews the purpose of trade agreements. We highlight that tra...Read more...

Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano and Thomas Sampson

1 March 2017

Journal article
Kyklos:
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

1 February 2017

Journal article
Journal of Human Capital:
Student awareness of costs and benefits of educational decisions: effects of an information campaign

Many students appear to leave full-time education too soon, despite the possibility of high returns from further investment in their education. One contributory factor may be insufficient information about the potential ...Read more...

Marty McGuigan, Sandra McNally and Gill Wyness

1 December 2016

Journal article
Annual Review of Economics:
The evolution of gender gaps in industrialized countries

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

Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

1 October 2016

Journal article
Energy Policy:
Competition and norms: a self-defeating combination?

This paper investigates the effects of information feedback mechanisms on electricity and heating usage at a student hall of residence in London. In a randomised control trial, we formulate different treatments such as f...Read more...

Genevieve Alberts, Zeynep Gurguc, Pantelis Koutroumpis, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls and Tamaryn Napp

1 September 2016

Journal article
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics:
Peer effects: evidence from secondary school transition in England

We estimate the effect of peers' prior achievement on student progress in secondary school, using administrative data on four cohorts of students in England. Students leaving primary for secondary school experience a big...Read more...

Steve Gibbons and Shqiponja Telhaj

1 August 2016

Journal article
Labour Economics:
School reforms and pupil performance

The relationship between school reforms, specifically those involving the introduction of new school types, and pupil performance is studied. The particular context is the introduction of academy schools in England, but ...Read more...

Andrew Eyles, Claudia Hupkau and Stephen Machin

1 August 2016

Journal article
Science:
Building functional cities

The literature views many African cities as dysfunctional with a hodgepodge of land uses and poor "connectivity." One driver of inefficient land uses is construction decisions for highly durable buildings made under weak...Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson, Anthony J. Venables, Tanner Regan and Ilia Samsonov

20 May 2016

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Universal pre-school education: the case of public funding with private provision

This article 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 Authoritie...Read more...

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

1 May 2016

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
The Impact of Supply Constraints on House Prices in England

We test the theoretical prediction that house prices respond more strongly to changes in local earnings in places with tight supply constraints using a unique panel dataset of 353 Local Planning Authorities in England be...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Wouter Vermeulen

1 March 2016

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
Trade induced technical change? The impact of Chinese imports on innovation, IT and productivity

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change - patenting, IT, and TFP - using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish th...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Mirko Draca and John Van Reenen

1 January 2016

Journal article
Econometrica:
The economics of density: evidence from the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empi...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm and Nikolaus Wolf

1 November 2015

Journal article
Journal of Happiness Studies:
Happy talk: mode of administration effects on subjective well-being

There is increasing interest in subjective well-being (SWB) both in academic and policy circles. As a result, considerable research efforts are now being directed at the validity and reliability of SWB measures. This stu...Read more...

Paul Dolan and Georgios Kavetsos

6 May 2015

Journal article
Feature Issue:
What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of well-being

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

Andrew E. Clark, Francesca Cornaglia, Richard Layard, Nattavudh Powdthavee and James Vernoit

1 November 2014

Journal article
Labour Economics:
Gender and the labor market: What have we learned from field and lab experiments?

We discuss the contribution of the experimental literature to the understanding of both traditional and previously unexplored dimensions of gender differences and discuss their bearings on labor market outcomes. Experime...Read more...

Ghazala Azmat and Barbara Petrongolo

1 October 2014

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
The impact of a carbon tax on manufacturing: Evidence from microdata

We estimate the impact of a carbon tax on manufacturing plants using panel data from the UK production census. Our identification strategy builds on the comparison of outcomes between plants subject to the full tax and p...Read more...

Ralf Martin, Ulrich J. Wagner and Laure B. de Preux

1 September 2014

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Industry compensation under relocation risk: a firm-level analysis of the EU emissions trading scheme

When regulated firms are offered compensation to prevent them from relocating, efficiency requires that payments be distributed across firms so as to equalize marginal relocation probabilities, weighted by the damage cau...Read more...

Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls, Ulrich J. Wagner and Laure B. de Preux

1 August 2014

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Crime Deterrence: Evidence From the London 2011 Riots

Significant riots occurred in London in August 2011. The riots took place in highly localised geographical areas, with crime going up hugely in the affected sub-wards. The criminal justice response was to make sentencing...Read more...

Brian Bell, Laura Jaitman and Stephen Machin

1 May 2014

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Has ICT polarized skill demand? Evidence from eleven countries over twenty-five years

We test the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) polarize labor markets by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated w...Read more...

Guy Michaels, Ashwini Natraj and John Van Reenen

1 March 2014

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Bankers and their bonuses

We analyse the role of financial sector workers in the huge rise of the share of earnings going to those at the very top of the pay distribution in the UK. Rising bankers' bonuses accounted for two-thirds of the increase...Read more...

Brian Bell and John Van Reenen

1 February 2014

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Crime and immigration: evidence from large immigrant waves

This paper focuses on empirical connections between crime and immigration, studying two large waves of recent UK immigration (the late 1990s/early 2000s asylum seekers and the post-2004 inflow from EU accession countries...Read more...

Brian Bell, Francesco Fasani and Stephen Machin

1 October 2013

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Immigration, offshoring, and American jobs

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration a...Read more...

Gianmarco Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri and Greg C. Wright

5 August 2013

Journal article
Economica:
Unemployment in the Great Recession

This paper studies the responses of unemployment in Germany, the USA and the UK to the Great Recession of 2008-9 using Beveridge curve analysis, and in the entire OECD using other techniques. It is shown that the UK suff...Read more...

Christopher A. Pissarides

1 July 2013

Journal article
Educational Research:
Educational attainment across the UK nations: performance, inequality and evidence

Political devolution occurred in the UK in 1998-99, following many years in which some degree of policy administration had been devolved to the four nations. Since devolution, all four countries of the UK have pursued in...Read more...

Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Gill Wyness

3 June 2013

Journal article
Journal of Urban Economics:
Valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities

Existing research shows that house prices respond to local school quality as measured by average test scores. However, higher test scores could signal higher academic value-added or higher ability, more sought-after inta...Read more...

Steve Gibbons, Stephen Machin and Olmo Silva

1 May 2013

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Innovation and institutional ownership

We find that greater institutional ownership is associated with more innovation. To explore the mechanism, we contrast the "lazy manager" hypothesis with a model where institutional owners increase innovation incentives ...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, John Van Reenen and Luigi Zingales

1 February 2013

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
Does management matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investiga...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Benn Eifert, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie and John Roberts

1 February 2013

Journal article
The Journal of Human Resources:
The effect of tracking students by ability into different schools

The tracking of pupils by ability into elite and non-elite schools represents a controversial policy in many countries. There is no consensus on how large the elite track should be and little agreement on the effects of ...Read more...

Nina Guyon, Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally

1 June 2012

Journal article
Journal of Labor Economics:
The good, the bad, and the average: evidence on ability peer effects in schools

We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers' ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our identification is based on ...Read more...

Victor Lavy, Olmo Silva and Felix Weinhardt

1 April 2012

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Americans do IT better: US multinationals and the productivity miracle

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in ...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

1 February 2012

Journal article
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics:
Genes, economics, and happiness

We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin design and genetic association study. In a nationally representative twin sample, we first show that ~33% of the variation in lif...Read more...

Nicholas A. Christakis, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, James H. Fowler and Bruno S. Frey

1 January 2012

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
The impact of immigration on the structure of wages: theory and evidence from Britain

Immigration to the UK, particularly among more educated workers, has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply. However studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any sign...Read more...

Marco Manacorda, Alan Manning and Jonathan Wadsworth

1 October 2011

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
Rethinking the effect of immigration on wages

This paper calculates the effects of immigration on the wages of native US workers of various skill levels in two steps. In the first step we use labor demand functions to estimate the elasticity of substitution across d...Read more...

Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri

1 October 2011

Journal article
International Review of Psychiatry:
Implementing NICE guidelines for the psychological treatment of depression and anxiety disorders: The IAPT experience

The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme is a large-scale initiative that aims to greatly increase the availability of NICE recommended psychological treatment for depression and anxiety disorders...Read more...

David M. Clark

25 August 2011

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
History and industry location: Evidence from German airports

A central prediction of a large class of theoretical models is that industry location is not uniquely determined by fundamentals. Despite the theoretical prominence of this idea, there is little systematic evidence in su...Read more...

Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm and Nikolaus Wolf

21 August 2011

Journal article
American Economic Review:
Panic on the streets of London: police, crime, and the July 2005 terror attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime, looking at what happened to crime and police before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeploy...Read more...

Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt

1 August 2011

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
Crime and Police Resources: The Street Crime Initiative

In this paper we look at the connection between police resources and crime by focussing on a large-scale policy intervention—the Street Crime Initiative—that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated ad...Read more...

Stephen Machin and Olivier Marie

1 August 2011

Journal article
Journal of Labor Economics:
Faith primary schools: better schools or better pupils?

We estimate the causal effect of attending a state Faith school on primary education achievement in England using administrative student-level data and implementing various strategies to control for students' selection i...Read more...

Steve Gibbons and Olmo Silva

1 July 2011

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
The crime reducing effect of education

In this article, we study the crime reducing potential of education, presenting causal statistical estimates based upon a law that changed the compulsory school leaving age in England and Wales. We frame the analysis in ...Read more...

Stephen Machin, Olivier Marie and Sunčica Vujić

1 May 2011

Journal article
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:
Minimum wages and firm profitability

We study the impact of minimum wages on firm profitability, exploiting the changes induced by the introduction of a UK national minimum wage in 1999. We use pre-policy information on the distribution of wages to implemen...Read more...

Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and John Van Reenen

1 January 2011

Journal article
Journal of Political Economy:
Can pay regulation kill? Panel data evidence on the effect of labor markets on hospital performance

In many sectors, pay is regulated to be equal across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. When the competitive outside wage is higher than the regulated wage, there are likely to be falls in quality. We exploit pane...Read more...

Carol Propper and John Van Reenen

1 April 2010

Journal article
Economica:
The wage impact of trade unions in the UK public and private sectors

There is a growing gap in the union membership wage premium between public and private-sector workers in the United Kingdom. Using the Labour Force Surveys of 1993-2006, the gap between the membership premium in the publ...Read more...

David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson

1 January 2010

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
The long-term effects of job search requirements: Evidence from the UK JSA reform

This paper investigates long-term returns from unemployment compensation, exploiting variation from the UK JSA reform of 1996, which implied a major increase in job search requirements for eligibility and in the related ...Read more...

Barbara Petrongolo

1 December 2009

Journal article
Review of Economic Dynamics:
The dynamics of city formation

This paper examines city formation in a country whose urban population is growing steadily over time, with new cities required to accommodate this growth. In contrast to most of the literature there is immobility of hous...Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson and Anthony J. Venables

1 April 2009

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
The marginal utility of income

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) me...Read more...

Richard Layard, Guy Mayraz and Stephen Nickell

1 August 2008

Journal article
Journal of Public Economics:
The literacy hour

In countries like the UK and the US, a significant and challenging problem facing educators is how to ensure that future generations do not suffer from the severe basic skills problems that currently hinder a sizeable gr...Read more...

Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally

1 June 2008

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
The part-time pay penalty for women in Britain

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This article tries to explain this part-time...Read more...

Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo

1 February 2008

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
Measuring and explaining management practices across firms and countries

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium-sized firms in the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associate...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen

1 November 2007

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
New technology in schools: is there a payoff?

Despite its high relevance to current policy debates, estimating the causal effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) investment on educational standards remains fraught with difficulties. We exploit a cha...Read more...

Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Olmo Silva

1 July 2007

Journal article
The Economic Journal:
Accounting for intergenerational income persistence: noncognitive skills, ability and education

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level...Read more...

Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Lindsey Macmillan

1 April 2007

Journal article
Review of Economics and Statistics:
Lousy and lovely jobs: the rising polarization of work in Britain

This paper shows that the United Kingdom since 1975 has exhibited a pattern of job polarization with rises in employment shares in the highest- and lowest-wage occupations. This is not entirely consistent with the idea o...Read more...

Maarten Goos and Alan Manning

1 February 2007

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
Causes of sprawl: a portrait from space

We study the extent to which US urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30 x 30 metre c...Read more...

Marcy Burchfield, Henry G. Overman, Diego Puga and Matthew A. Turner

1 May 2006

Journal article
Economic Journal:
Happiness and public policy: a challenge to the profession

The theory behind public economics needs radical reform. It fails to explain the recent history of human welfare and it ignores some of the key findings of modern psychology. Indeed these two failings are intimately link...Read more...

Richard Layard

1 March 2006

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
Testing for localization using micro-geographic data

To study the detailed location patterns of industries, and particularly the tendency for industries to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localization. In contrast to previous s...Read more...

Gilles Duranton and Henry G. Overman

1 October 2005

Journal article
Journal of Human Resources:
Crime and economic incentives

We explore the role that economic incentives, particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution, play in determining crime rates. We use data on the police force areas of England and Wales between ...Read more...

Stephen Machin and Costas Meghir

2 September 2004

Journal article
Journal of the European Economic Association:
Evaluating the employment impact of a mandatory job search program

This paper exploits area-based piloting and age-related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program-the New Deal for Young People in the U.K. A central focus is on substitution/displacement ...Read more...

Richard Blundell, Monica Costa Dias, Costas Meghir and John Van Reenen

1 June 2004

Journal article
Journal of International Economics:
Economic geography and international inequality

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. We provide evidence that the geography of acces...Read more...

Stephen J. Redding and Anthony J. Venables

1 January 2004

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
The changing distribution of male wages in the UK

This paper uses microeconomic data from the UK Family Expenditure Surveys (FES) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages. Since the late 1970s wage inequal...Read more...

A Gosling, Stephen Machin and Costas Meghir

1 October 2000

Journal article
Journal of Labor Economics:
The effects of minimum wages on employment: theory and evidence from Britain

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by empirical work in some labor markets. We presen...Read more...

Richard Dickens, Stephen Machin and Alan Manning

1 January 1999

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
Technology and changes in skill structure: evidence from seven OECD countries

This paper compares the changing skill structure of wage bills and employment in the United States with six other OECD countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). We investigate whether a...Read more...

Stephen Machin and John Van Reenen

1 November 1998

Journal article
World Bank Economic Review:
Trading Arrangements and Industrial Development

This article outlines a new approach for analyzing the role of trade in promoting industrial development. It offers an explanation as to why firms are reluctant to move to countries with lower labor costs and shows how t...Read more...

Diego Puga and Anthony J. Venables

1 May 1998

Journal article
Journal of Political Economy:
Competition and corporate performance

Are people right to think that competition improves corporate performance? My investigations indicate first that there are some theoretical reasons for believing this hypothesis to be correct, but they are not overwhelmi...Read more...

Stephen Nickell

1 August 1996

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
The creation and capture of rents: wages and innovation in a panel of UK companies

This paper examines the impact of technological innovation on wages using a panel of British firms. A head-count measure of major innovations between 1945 and 1983 is combined with share price and accounting information....Read more...

John Van Reenen

1 February 1996

Journal article
The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
Globalization and the Inequality of Nations

A monopolistically competitive manufacturing sector produces goods used for final consumption and as intermediates. Intermediate usage creates cost and demand linkages between firms and a tendency for manufacturing agglo...Read more...

P Krugman and Anthony J. Venables

1 November 1995

Journal article
The Review of Economic Studies:
Job creation and job destruction in the theory of unemployment

In this paper we model a job-specific shock process in the matching model of unemployment with non-cooperative wage behaviour. We obtain endogenous job creation and job destruction processes and study their properties. W...Read more...

Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides

1 July 1994