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Occasional papers

Occasional papers provide commentaries on policy or on topics outside the CEP mainstream.

Smiling pensioner, from Unsplash
A wellbeing cost-benefit analysis of raising the state pension age

Assessing how proposed increases in the UK state pension age to manage ageing population pressures would impact on wellbeing.
Pencils laid out in a spectrum of colours, from Unsplash
Mental health support teams in schools: Evidence and assumptions

Sara MacLennan evaluates the cost-effectiveness of providing NICE-recommended psychological therapy to young people, focusing on health and government savings.

Latest Occasional papers

CEP occasional paper
A wellbeing cost-benefit analysis of raising the state pension age

Governments of developed countries are facing growing pressures from the fiscal demands of an ageing population. To cope with this, they have tried to get individuals to work longer, primarily by raising the ages at whic...Read more...

David Frayman

4 September 2024

CEP occasional paper
The Lower Thames crossing

Being on the move can spiral our mood up or down. There is well-known evidence that walking and cycling can directly improve our mental health as well as our physical health; many of us have experienced feelings of freed...Read more...

Sara MacLennan

4 September 2024

CEP occasional paper
The apprenticeship guarantee

The UK has a poor record of providing opportunities to learn skills for the around half of young people that do not attend university. Over a third of 18-year-olds in England are not undertaking any education or training...Read more...

David Frayman

4 September 2024

CEP occasional paper
Mental health support teams in schools: Evidence and assumptions

In this paper we examine the cost-effectiveness of providing NICE recommended psychological therapy to young people. For each type of mental health problem we show: (i) the assumptions used to derive the impact of treati...Read more...

Sara MacLennan

4 September 2024

CEP occasional paper
Mental health and employment

In this report we evaluate the benefits and costs of providing NICE recommended treatment for addiction or severe mental health problems over a two-year time horizon for one individual. We separately investigate addictio...Read more...

Isaac Parkes

4 September 2024

CEP occasional paper
A micro-geographic house price index for England and Wales

We generate a mix-adjusted house price index for England and Wales from 2010 to 2020 at the level of lower-layer super output areas. To this end, we blend parametric and non-parametric estimation techniques and leverage ...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Felipe Carozzi and Lukas Makovsky

1 December 2023

CEP occasional paper
Projecting UK net migration

Predicting migration is notoriously difficult but unavoidable if, for example, we want projections of future population. We present a new 'bottom-up' approach to projecting net migration, whereby emigration is estimated ...Read more...

Tessa Hall, Alan Manning and Madeleine Sumption

16 October 2023

CEP occasional paper
The trouble with inactivity

Elevated concerns over the consequences of recent rises in the UK economic inactivity rate for growth, wages and prices have prominently featured in recent public debate about the labour market and the economy. This pape...Read more...

Stephen Machin and Jonathan Wadsworth

25 July 2023

CEP occasional paper
The linear algebra of economic geography models

We provide sufficient statistics for nominal and real wage exposure to productivity shocks in a constant elasticity economic geography model. These exposure measures summarize the first-order general equilibrium elastici...Read more...

Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding

11 July 2023

CEP occasional paper
School qualifications and youth custody

A very small number of young people enter youth custody between age 16 and 18 (about 4 in 1000 males), yet the consequences are severe. They spend an average of 7 months in youth custody and such incarceration has been r...Read more...

Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

12 January 2023

CEP occasional paper
Housing policy and affordable housing

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities around the world. The main underlying cause for the 'affordability crisis', which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of stro...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Olivier Schöni

11 May 2022

CEP occasional paper
Prices and inflation in the UK - A new dataset

This paper presents a new dataset of 41 million UK consumer prices, providing facts on the frequency, size and timing of price changes between 1988 and 2020. The micro data are the ‘price quotes’ of individual consumer p...Read more...

Richard Davies

5 February 2021

CEP occasional paper
Are happier people more compliant? Global evidence from three large-scale surveys during Covid-19 lockdowns

Around the world, governments have been asking their citizens to practice physical distancing and stay at home to contain the spread of Covid-19. Are happier people more willing to comply with these measures? Using three...Read more...

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Daisy Fancourt, Christian Krekel and Sarah Swanke

28 September 2020

CEP occasional paper
Regional differences in UK transport BCRs: an empirical assessment

The UK government uses a Value for Money (VfM) framework to help allocate infrastructure expenditure. At the core of this framework is a benefit to cost ratio (BCR) that is calculated using a set of established monetised...Read more...

Nicolás González-Pampillón and Henry G. Overman

21 September 2020

CEP occasional paper
Labour markets in the time of Coronavirus: measuring excess

Recessions are usually accompanied by some combination of job loss, hiring freezes, wage cuts or hours reductions. In a rapidly evolving economic crisis there is a need for timely information to assess labour market perf...Read more...

Jonathan Wadsworth

3 July 2020

CEP occasional paper
Preserving job matches during the Covid-19 pandemic: firm-level evidence on the role of government aid

We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and government policies on firms’ aid takeup, layoff and furlough decisions. We collect new survey data for 10,642 small, medium and large Danish firms, and match to governm...Read more...

Morten Bennedsen, Berthe Larsen, Ian M. Schmutte and Daniela Scur

1 July 2020

CEP occasional paper
The early impact of Covid-19 on local commerce: changes in spend across neighborhoods and online

We document a number of striking features about the initial impact of the pandemic on local commerce across 16 US cities. There are two novel contributions from this analysis: exploration of neighborhood-level effects an...Read more...

Diana Farrell, Lindsay E. Relihan, Marvin W. Ward Jr. and Chris W. Wheat

11 June 2020

CEP occasional paper
When to release the lockdown: a wellbeing framework for analysing costs and benefits

In choosing when to end the lockdown, policy-makers have to balance the impact of the decision upon incomes, unemployment, mental health, public confidence and many other factors, as well as (of course) upon the number o...Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Daisy Fancourt, Nancy Hey, Christian Krekel, Richard Layard and Gus O'Donnell

24 April 2020

CEP occasional paper
Clusters in UK self-employment

UK Self-employment has soared in recent years. With existing labour market policy designed to cater for conventional employee relationships, policymakers in this field are increasingly seeking to better understand these ...Read more...

Jack Blundell

1 February 2020

CEP occasional paper
Immigration

Immigration remains a highly contentious issue and its purported effects on the labour market and the wider economy are still highly contested. The discussion below is intended as an overview of what we know and what we ...Read more...

Jonathan Wadsworth

28 November 2019

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