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Occasional papers

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

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Prices and inflation in the UK - a new dataset

Richard Davies analyses UK price changes between 1988 and 2020 comparing shocks such as the 2008 crash and the Brexit referendum and Covid-19, finding a pattern that closely matches other countries. Read more...
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Are happier people more compliant?

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Daisy Fancourt, Christian Krekel and Sarah Swanke examine the relationship between people's levels of happiness and their willingness to comply with lockdown measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Read more...

Latest Occasional papers

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 March 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

CEP occasional paper
International Data on Measuring Management Practices

We examine methods used to survey firms on their management and organizational practices. We contrast the strengths and weaknesses of “open ended questions” (like the World Management Survey) with “closed questions” (lik...Read more...

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

19 January 2016

CEP occasional paper
The UK's Productivity Puzzle

The 2008 Great Recession was notable in the UK for three things: the enormity of the output shock; the muted unemployment response; and the very slow rate of recovery. We review the literature which finds most of the dec...Read more...

Alex Bryson and John Forth

29 May 2015

CEP occasional paper
Mapping Information Economy Businesses with Big Data: Findings for the UK

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT and digital industries. Policymakers thus need a clear sense of the size and characteristics of digital businesses, but this is hard to do with conventional datasets...Read more...

Max Nathan and Anna Rosso

8 December 2014

CEP occasional paper
Knowledge-based Hierarchies: Using Organizations to Understand the Economy

We argue that incorporating the decision of how to organize the acquisition, use, and communication of knowledge into economic models is essential to understand a wide variety of economic phenomena. We survey the literat...Read more...

Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

16 October 2014

CEP occasional paper
Dynemp: A Stata® Routine for Distributed Micro-data Analysis of Business Dynamics

This paper introduces a new Stata® command, dynemp, which implements a distributed micro-data analysis of business and employment dynamics and firm demographics. The data source it requires are business registers or comp...Read more...

Chiara Criscuolo, Peter N. Gal and Carlo Menon

6 June 2014

CEP occasional paper
The new empirical economics of management

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP diff...Read more...

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

28 April 2014

CEP occasional paper
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

14 March 2014

CEP occasional paper
Money, Well-being and Loss Aversion: Does an Income Loss Have a Greater Effect on Well-being than an Equivalent Income Gain?

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses impact on well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined with relation to decisions...Read more...

Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, James Banks, Andrew E. Clark and Gordon D.A. Brown

9 January 2014

CEP occasional paper
Fluctuations in Uncertainty

This review article tries to answer four questions: (i) what are the stylized facts about uncertainty over time; (ii) why does uncertainty vary; (iii) do fluctuations in uncertainty matter; and (iv) did higher uncertaint...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom

13 December 2013

CEP occasional paper
Medium and Long Run Prospects for UK Growth in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis

The productivity performance of the UK economy in the period 1990-2007 was excellent. Based entirely on pre-crisis data, and using a two-sector growth model, I project the future growth rate of GDP per hour in the market...Read more...

Nicholas Oulton

22 October 2013

CEP occasional paper
Incomplete Contracts and the Internal Organisation of Firms

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on decentralization within firms. We first discuss how the concept of incomplete contracts shapes our views about the organization of decision-making within firms. We th...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen

13 March 2013

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