Skip to main content

Occasional papers

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

Photograph of a group of children playing in the sun by Rajesh Rajput via Unsplash
The C-WELLBY: Towards a universal measure of children's wellbeing for policy analysis

Why a universal measure of children's wellbeing is needed for policy cost-benefit analyses.
Office workers, from Unsplash
The high price of doing nothing: evaluating an expansion of employment support for health-related inactivity

Employment support for those with health conditions offers significant financial benefits, especially for mild-to-moderate cases.

Latest Occasional papers

CEP occasional paper
Mapping Functions for Wellbeing Measures to Generate WELLBYs for Use in Economic Evaluation

Ideally, outcome measurements for interventions that affect wellbeing would report the standard, ONS recommended, life satisfaction question. Responses to this question directly correspond to WELLBYs, which can be moneti...Read more...

Isaac Parkes

3 June 2025

CEP occasional paper
The C-WELLBY: Towards a Universal Measure of Children's Wellbeing for Policy Analysis

There is a pressing need for a universal measure of children's wellbeing, parallel to the WELLBY, for use in cost-benefit analysis. Currently, there is no consensus on how to value the wellbeing of children, raising conc...Read more...

Isaac Parkes

15 April 2025

CEP occasional paper
The high price of doing nothing: evaluating an expansion of employment support for health-related inactivity

Employment support for those with mild-to-moderate health conditions is estimated to deliver large benefits to the individual and government finances, paying for itself within 5 years. This suggests enabling inactive ind...Read more...

David Frayman

12 December 2024

CEP occasional paper
Has work from home shifted the US electoral map?

Since 2020, the dramatic rise in remote work has coincided with increased geographic mobility in the United States. We examine the relationship between these trends and their effects on the electoral landscape. Using IRS...Read more...

Peter Lambert and Chris Larkin

4 November 2024

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

Latest 20 publications shown.     View all