Results

CVER Research Paper

Where versus What: College Value-Added and Returns to Field of Study in Further Education

Enrolling in vocational education and training programs constitutes a natural response to the current dynamics of the labour market, which is being reshaped by routinisation, automation, and outsourcing. We estimate the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Bank default risk propagation along supply chains: evidence from the UK

How does banks’ default risk affect the probability of default of non-financial businesses? The literature has addressed this question by focusing on the direct effects on the banks’ corporate customers – demonstrating t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Family background and the responses to higher SAT scores

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT system, we show that additional admission opportunities causally affect college choices. Students with high-educated parents change timing, colleges, and fields in ways that a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing global production: theory and evidence from just-in-time supply chains

Global value chains are highly fragmented across countries and dominated by a few large multinational firms. But the challenges of an increasingly difficult international business environment are raising the question of ...Read more...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Import competition, heterogeneous preferences of managers and productivity

When managers have objectives beyond maximizing monetary profits, inefficiencies may arise. An increase in competition may then force managers to improve the productivity of the firm in order to ensure survival. While th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring the gains from labor specialization

We estimate the productivity effects of labor specialization using a judicial environment that offers a quasi-experimental setting well suited to this purpose. Judges in this environment are randomly assigned many differ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief...Big city, bright future: why birthplace matters so much

How much does where you were born influence your future earnings? Analysing data from the British Household Panel Survey, Clément Bosquet and Henry Overman reveal that, on average, someone born in London in the 1970s ear...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

When free trade lands on the banking desk

The effect of trade liberalisation on economic activity remains one of the most important questions in economics. While prominent theories of international trade show that free trade improves the allocation of resources ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Measuring the effect of innovation on productivity inside firms

The role of innovation in explaining economic performance has been a focus of economic research for decades, and many questions remain unanswered. One of the main challenges is how we measure innovation. Only by improvin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When income effects are large: labor supply responses and the value of welfare transfers

I estimate the long-run income effect of welfare transfers on individual labor supply. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of survivor insurance recipients, I implement a regression discontinuity design aro...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why No-Deal Brexit is a battle for the soul of our nation

We are careening towards the most extreme form of Brexit imaginable – flouncing out of the European Union (EU) after 46 years, without any transition plan. Operation Yellowhammer, a leaked secret report from the governme...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Compact cities have many advantages – clean air isn’t one of them

Air pollution is bad for us. We all know that polluted air is detrimental to our health and recent research shows that it can also affect our performance in education, productivity at work and even our safety. This has i...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Can economic incentives promote a more equal gender division of house chores?

Gender identity norms such as the male bread-winner model are possible drivers of persistent gender inequalities in the labour market. However, the extent to which they restrict the behaviour of couples is debated. While...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Panama Canal reshaped the economic geography of the United States

In the early 20th century a ship travelling from San Francisco to New York or on to Europe first had to travel over 13,000 miles around the entirety of South America. That all changed in August of 1914 with the opening o...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The 2018 trade war: consumers are paying a high price

Over the course of 2018, the Trump administration imposed import tariffs on approximately $283 billion of US imports, with rates ranging between 10 and 50 per cent. In response, US trading partners, especially China, ret...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief...Brexit and outward investment by UK firms

Media reports have highlighted that some UK firms have started to move production abroad in anticipation of Brexit. CEP analysis confirms that there has indeed been a substantial increase in outward investments. The shif...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Widening the high school curriculum to include soft skill training: impacts on health, behaviour, emotional wellbeing and occupational aspirations

From 2020 the health and relationships aspects of Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education will be compulsory in UK schools for adolescents. However less is known about how it can be taught in an effective manner....Read more...

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...

CEP discussion paper

The comparative advantage of firms

Multiproduct firms dominate production, and their product turnover contributes substantially to aggregate growth. Theories propose that multiproduct firms grow by diversifying into products which need the same know-how o...Read more...

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...

CentrePiece article

Measuring the economic costs of discrimination: insights from Nazi Germany

Kilian Huber and colleagues analyse the effects of the Nazis' purge of Jewish managers from German firms....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Europe's transformation after Gutenberg: the impact of new media and competition

Jeremiah Dittmar explores the effects of the printing press and the new forms of competition that accompanied its introduction....Read more...

CEP Brexit analysis

Voting with their money: Brexit and outward investment by UK firms

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has grown rapidly in recent decades. Through FDI, firms headquartered in the UK can own and operate subsidiaries throughout the world. FDI opportunities give firms a choice between investi...Read more...

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...

CEP discussion paper

New media and competition: printing and Europe's transformation after Gutenberg

We study the role of book content in economic, religious, and institutional development after the introduction of printing, and the role of competition in determining the amount and content of local printing. We focus on...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Discrimination, managers, and firm performance: evidence from “Aryanizations” in Nazi Germany

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified business leaders who belong to targeted groups. We study how the forced removal of Jewish managers in Nazi Germany, caused by surging ant...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization and state capitalism: assessing Vietnam's accession to the WTO

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology, market structure and the gains from trade

We study the gains from trade in a new model with oligopolistic competition, firm heterogeneity, and innovation. Lowering trade costs reduces markups on domestic sales but increases markups on export sales, as firms do n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor specialization as a source of market frictions

This paper investigates why labor specialization brings additional frictions to the labor market. The intuition is that labor specialized firms rely on complementarity and firm-specific human capital, assigning high valu...Read more...

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...

CentrePiece article

in brief...Multinationals and the customs union

Leaving the customs union may lead multinationals to move out of the UK, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs. That is the conclusion of research by Paola Conconi. She explains that in a customs union, goods cross ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Specialization matters in the firm size-wage gap

This study applies the O-ring theory to explain the firm-size wage premium. It focuses on the joint role of the division of labor and employee characteristics. Including the firm heterogeneity of occupations in a standar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm-to-firm connections in Colombian imports

The vast majority of world trade flows is between firms. Only recently has research in international trade started to emphasize the importance of the connections between exporters and importers both in aggregate trade fl...Read more...

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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

All in the family? CEO choice and firm organization

Family firms are the most prevalent firm type in the world, particularly in emerging economies. Dynastic family firms tend to have lower productivity, though what explains their underperformance is stil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

From final goods to inputs: the protectionist effect of rules of origin

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those o...Read more...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Product diversification in Indian manufacturing

The presence of global value chains challenges the neoclassical idea of the firm since it implies firms are not monolithic but are rather interdependent on the larger economic environment. Examining establishments, the s...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Matching Firms and Workers in a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

Do matching frictions affect youth employment in developing countries? We organise job fairs in Addis Ababa, to match firms with a representative sample of young, educated job-seekers. We create very few jobs: one for ap...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Where industry is strong and where it’s weak – key facts of UK business geography

Financial services aren’t as London-centric as the creative industries, and the coast-inland divide is growing, write Sandra Bernick, Richard Davies, and Anna Valero. The UK’s financial services industry is not nearly as...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The fall of the labor share and the rise of superstar firms

The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Concentrating on the fall of the labor share

In this paper, we discuss an explanation for the fall in share of labour in GDP based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, prod...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global banking: risk taking and competition

Direct involvement of global banks in local retail activities can reduce risk-taking by promoting local competition. We develop this argument through a model in which multinational banks operate simultaneously in differe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multi-product firms and product quality

We examine the global operations of multi-product firms. We present a flexible heterogeneous-firm trade model with either limited or strong scope for quality differentiation. Using customs data for China during 2002-2006...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fertility and mothers' labor supply: new evidence using time-to-conception

We analyze the impact of children on their mothers' labor market outcomes in the UK. We use time-to-conception of the first child as an exogenous variation in the probability of having more children. We find that having ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Stimulative Effect of an Unconditional Block Grant on the Decentralized Provision of Care

Understanding the impact of central government grants on decentralized health care provision is of crucial importance for the design of grant systems, yet empirical evidence on the prevalence of flypaper effects in this ...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

The ‘photo-finish effect’: when third place winners are happier than second

Laura Kudrna, a London School of Economics scholarship PhD candidate, researches the effects of achievement on happiness, particularly focusing on examples of when greater success – be it financial, academic, romantic, o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A unified approach to estimating demand and welfare

The measurement of price changes, economic welfare, and demand parameters is currently based on three disjoint approaches: macroeconomic models derived from time-invariant utility functions, microeconomic estimation base...Read more...

CentrePiece article

in brief... Management practices in Pakistan

For more than a decade, CEP economists have been leading efforts to get measures of management incorporated into the statistical infrastructure used by governments and researchers. The authors report on the latest initia...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Product switching and the business cycle

This paper explores role of product adding and dropping within manufacturing firms over the business cycle. While a substantial body of work has explored the importance of the extensive margins of firm entry and exit in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Protectionism through exporting: subsidies with export share requirements in China

We study the effect of subsidies subject to export share requirements (ESR) - that is, conditioned on a firm exporting at least a given fraction of its output - on exports, the intensity of competition and welfare, throu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exporter dynamics and partial-year effects

Two identical firms that start exporting in different months, one each in January and December, will report dramatically different exports for the first calendar year. This partial-year effect biases down first year expo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Two-sided heterogeneity and Trade

This paper develops a multi-country model of international trade that provides a simple micro-foundation for buyer-seller relationships in trade. We explore a rich dataset that identifies buyers and sellers in trade and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rethinking deindustrialization

Manufacturing in high-income countries is on the decline and Denmark is no exception. Manufacturing employment and the number of firms have been shrinking as a share of the total and in absolute levels. This paper uses a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global firms

Research in international trade has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, as attention has shifted from countries and industries towards the firms actually engaged in international trade. The now-standard hete...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Special and differential treatment for developing countries

Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries (SDT) constitutes a central feature of the GATT/WTO system. Its formal goal is to foster export-led growth in developing countries. Its theoretical foundations ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Swimming upstream: input-output linkages and the direction of product adoption

Multiproduct firms dominate production, and their product turnover contributes substantially to aggregate growth. Firms continually adapt their product mix, but what determines which products firms expand into? Theories ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Why Does Birthplace Matter So Much? Sorting, Learning and Geography

We consider the link between birthplace and wages. Using a unique panel dataset we estimate a raw elasticity of wage with respect to birthplace size of 4.6%, two thirds of the 6.8% raw elasticity with respect to city siz...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Contracting and the division of the gains from trade

This paper examines the microstructure of import markets and the division of the gains from trade among consumers, importers and exporters. When exporters and importers transact through anonymous markets, double marginal...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How firms export: processing vs. ordinary trade with financial frictions

The fragmentation of production across borders allows firms to make and export final goods, or to perform only intermediate stages of production by processing imported inputs for re-exporting. We examine how financial fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Media, markets and institutional Change: evidence from the protestant reformation

This research studies the role of competition in the diffusion of radical ideas and institutional change during the Protestant Reformation. We construct a new measure of religious content in the media using data on all k...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Family business: management effort and firm performance

Might familyowned, familyrun firms be a serious obstacle to productivity growth in Europe? Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun have collected time use data on over 1,000 chief executive officers to explore d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firming up inequality

Earnings inequality in the United States has increased rapidly over the last three decades, but little is known about the role of firms in this trend. For example, how much of the rise in earnings inequality can be attri...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Top Rate of Income Tax

The main political parties disagree about the appropriate rate of income Tax on the highest incomes. This note lays out the economic principles surrounding the top rate of income tax and considers the evidence that high ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Integrated estimates of capital stocks and services for the United Kingdom: 1950-2013

This paper presents annual estimates of fixed capital stocks and capital services for the United Kingdom, 1950-2013, for the whole economy and for the market sector. Our estimates cover eight asset types (structures, mac...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Preferences for fair prices, cursed inferences, and the nonneutrality of money

This paper explains the nonneutrality of money from two assumptions: (1) consumers dislike paying prices that exceed some fair markup on firms’ marginal costs; and (2) consumers under infer marginal costs from available ...Read more...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Optimal Contracting and the Organization of Knowledge

We study contractual arrangements that support an efficient use of time in a knowledge-intensive economy in which agents endogenously specialize in either production or consulting. The resulting market for advice is plag...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What is 'Firm Heterogeneity' in Trade Models? The Role of Quality, Scope, Markups and Cost

We estimate a structural model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms to examine the sources of firm heterogeneity emphasized in the recent trade and macro literatures. Using Nielsen barcode data on prices and sales, we est...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Locus of Control and Its Intergenerational Implications for Early Childhood Skill Formation

We propose a model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on the early skill formation of their children. This subjective belief is determined in part by locus of control (LOC), i....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Because I'm Worth It: A Lab-Field Experiment on the Spillover Effects of Incentives in Health

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task – and then how...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reconciling Observed Tariffs and the Median Voter Model

Median voter theory applied to trade policy predicts positive tariffs in capital-abundant countries and negative tariffs in labor-abundant countries. Negative tariffs are rare, and this paper reconciles the median voter ...Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics and Policy Blog:

Leaving the European Union would likely have a significant negative impact on the UK’s economy

How would leaving the EU affect the UK’s economy? Gianmarco Ottaviano, João Paulo Pessoa, Thomas Sampson and John Van Reenen outline findings from a new report on the economic consequences of a ‘Brexit’. They indicate th...Read more...

Blog

LSE American Politics and Policy Blog:

Firms with more structured management practices are more productive, innovative and have faster employment growth.

In 2010, the US Census Bureau conducted the first large-scale survey of management practices in America, gathering data on more than 30,000 manufacturing plants. Nicholas Bloom and colleagues find strong links between es...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief - New technology: who wins, who loses?

Technology has transformed the once powerful office of ambassador into a glorified sales position, while nurses, teaching assistants and medical technicians all benefit from the ICT revolution. According to an empirical ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and com...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Do Long Distance Moves Discourage Homeownership? Evidence from England

We hypothesize that as the distance of a residential move increases, the cost of collecting information on the destination housing market rises, the amount and quality of information collected fall, and the chances of ma...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief: China's trading success: the role of pure exporter subsidies

China's government provides a wide range of incentives to encourage firms to produce almost exclusively for the foreign market. The authors analyse the impact of these 'pure exporter subsidies' on both the Chinese econom...Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics and Policy Blog:

Small isn’t always beautiful: The cost of regulation on French firms

France has a raft of labour-market regulations that kick in for firms with 50 workers or more. Luis Garicano and John Van Reenen use this threshold to identify the economic effects of size-contingent regulations. Such po...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pushing On a String: US Monetary Policy is Less Powerful in Recessions

We estimate the impulse response of key US macro series to the monetary policy shocks identified by Romer and Romer (2004), allowing the response to depend flexibly on the state of the business cycle. We find strong evid...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Concentration Versus Re-Matching? Evidence About the Locational Effects of Commuting Costs

Using administrative employer-employee data from Germany, I exploit two reductions of tax breaks for commuting in 2003/4 and 2006/7 to estimate commuting costs’ effect on the decision to switch job and move house. Standa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Patents and Cumulative Innovation: Causal Evidence from the Courts

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Do Large Departments Make Academics More Productive? Agglomeration and Peer Effects in Research

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department ...Read more...

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...

CEP discussion paper

China's Pure Exporter Subsidies

One third of Chinese exporters sell more than ninety percent of their production abroad. We argue that this distinctive pattern is attributable to a wide range of subsidies that provide incentives to these “pure exporter...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Selection Effects with Heterogeneous Firms

We provide a general characterization of which firms will select alternative ways of serving a market. If and only if firms' maximum profits are supermodular in production and marketaccess costs, more efficient firms wil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exporters, Importers and Credit Constraints

This paper analyses the interaction between credit constraints and trading behaviour. I construct a unique dataset containing firm-level trade transactions data, balance sheets and credit scores from an independent credi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market Size, Competition, and the Product Mix of Exporters

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how competition across market destinations affects both a firm's exported product range and product mix. We show how tougher competition in an export ma...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief: UK chief executives: paid for performance?

Does it matter whether you work for a successful company? And if so, does it matter who you are? To answer these questions we construct a unique panel dataset covering the pay of all CEOs, senior managers and a fully rep...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Span of Control and Span of Activity

For both practitioners and researchers, span of control plays an important role in defining and understanding the role of the CEO. In this paper, we combine organizational chart information for a sample of 65 companies w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intermediaries in International Trade: Direct Versus Indirect Modes of Export

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different produc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global Value Chains During the Great Trade Collapse: A Bullwhip Effect?

This paper analyzes the performance of global value chains during the trade collapse. To do so, it exploits a unique transaction-level dataset on French firms containing information on cross-border monthly transactions m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happiness as a Driver of Risk-Avoiding Behavior

Most governments try to discourage their citizens from taking extreme risks with their health and lives. Yet, for reasons not understood, many people continue to do so. We suggest a new approach to this longstanding ques...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Determinants of Intrafirm Trade: Evidence from French Firms

How well does the theory of the firm explain the choice between intrafirm and arms' length trade? This paper uses firm-level import data from France to look into this question. We find support for three key predictions o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gravity Redux: Measuring International Trade Costs with Panel Data

Barriers to international trade are known to be large but due to data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem I derive a micro-founded meas...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trading Away Wide Brands for Cheap Brands

Firms face competing needs to expand product variety and reduce production costs. Trade policy affects firm investments in product variety and production processes differently. Access to larger markets enables innovation...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Role of Educational Quality and Quantity in the Process of Economic Development

We develop a theory of human capital investment to study the channels through which students react to school quality when deciding on investments in secondary education and above, and to study how educational quality aff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mass Education or a Minority Well Educated Elite in the Process of Development: the Case of India

This paper analyses whether in developing countries mass education is more growth enhancing than to have a minority well educated elite. Using the Indian census data as a benchmark and enrollment rates at different level...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Empirics of Firm Heterogeneity and International Trade

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on firm heterogeneity in international trade. A first wave of empirical findings from micro data on plants and firms proposed challenges for existing models of inter- national tr...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Agglomeration Externalities and Urban Growth Controls

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: True PPPs for 141 Countries

I set out a new method for estimating true (Konüs) PPPs. Household consumption per head deflated by these PPPs answers the question: by how much must the average expenditure per head of poor country A be increased to ena...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Advertising Expenditure and Consumer Prices

This paper studies the effect of a change in the marginal costs of advertising on advertising expenditures of firms and consumer prices across industries. It makes use of a unique policy change that caused a decrease of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Simple Theory of Managerial Talent, Pay Contracts and Wage Distribution

This paper develops a simple theory of pay structures and pay levels across heterogeneous agents by bringing together optimal contracts inside the firm and competitive resource allocation in the market. The central idea ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managerial Incentives and Compensation in a Global Market

This paper embeds a principal-agent firm in an otherwise standard trade model a la Melitz (2003) to investigate the impact of globalization on the provision of managerial incentives and on the distribution of managerial ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Union Density and Varieties of Coverage: The Anatomy of Union Wage Effects in Germany

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Crime and Mental Wellbeing

Most estimates of the cost of crime focus on victims. Yet it is plausible that an even larger cost of crime occurs via its indirect impact on the mental wellbeing of non-victims. To test how crime affects individuals’ me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Management Matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Communal Responsibility and the Coexistence of Money and Credit Under Anonymous Matching

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Long Term Implications of the ICT Revolution: Applying the Lessons of Growth Theory and Growth Accounting

How big a boost to long run growth can countries expect from the ICT revolution? I use the results of growth accounting and the insights from a two-sector growth model to answer this question. The use of a two-sector rat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Bank Bailouts, International Linkages and Cooperation

Financial institutions are increasingly linked internationally. As a result, financial crisis and government intervention have stronger effects beyond borders. We provide a model of international contagion allowing for b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Monetary Policy Rules and Foreign Currency Positions

Using an endogenous portfolio choice model, this paper examines how different monetary policy regimes can lead to different foreign currency positions by changing the cyclical properties of the nominal exchange rate. We ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade Crisis? What Trade Crisis?

We provide an analysis of the 2008-2009 trade collapse using microdata from a small open economy, Belgium. First, we find that changes in firm-country-product exports and imports occurred mostly at the intensive margin: ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Theories of Heterogeneous Firms and Trade

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, which emphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources across firms. We discuss the empirical chal...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

LSE Centre for Economic Performance: Reducing Crime: More Police, More Prisons or More Pay?

Crime is usually high on the list of voter concerns. This might seem surprising since total crime has fallen significantly since the mid 1990s. Yet two thirds of the population still (wrongly) think that crime is rising ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality Matters - the Expulsion of Professors and Ph.D. Student Outcomes in Nazi Germany

I investigate the effect of faculty quality on Ph.D. student outcomes. To address the endogeneity of faculty quality I use exogenous variation provided by the expulsion of mathematics professors in Nazi Germany. I find t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Slip Sliding Away: Further Union Decline in Germany and Britain

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wage Bargaining and the Boundaries of the Multinational Firm

Do variations in labor market institutions across countries affect the cross-border organization of the firm? Using firm-level data on multinationals located in France, we show that firms are more likely to outsource the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Welfare Policy and the Distribution of Hours of Work

We examine the distribution of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities when sectors are divided into three groups: one that produces goods without home substitutes and two oth...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rates of Return and Alternative Measures of Capital Input: 14 Countries and 10 Branches, 1971-2005

We employ the EU KLEMS database to estimate the real rate of return to capital in 14 countries (11 in the EU, three outside the EU) in 10 branches of the market economy plus the market economy as a whole. Our measure of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How to Measure Living Standards and Productivity

This paper sets out a general algorithm for calculating true cost-of-living indices or true producer price indices when demand is not homothetic, i.e. when not all expenditure elasticities are equal to one. In principle,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Organization of Firms Across Countries

We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sale...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization

Guided by theories of management by exception, we study the impact of Information and Communication Technology on worker and plant manager autonomy and on span of control. We find, using an original dataset of American a...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Spillover and Backward Linkage Effects of FDI: Empirical Evidence for the UK

Recent work (including that of the author) on the impact of FDI has been based on microlevel (i.e. firms, establishments or plants) data, since this allows much greater control when examining such issues as whether FDI p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Margins of US Trade

Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms’ extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Family Control Affect Trade Performance? Evidence for Italian Firms

This paper examines whether the export decision of firms is affected by their ownership structure, specifically it looks at whether family control is an obstacle to entering foreign markets. The underlying assumption is ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vulnerability of Currency Pegs: Evidence from Brazil

This paper analyses predictions of a simple model of currency crises in which the peg will be abandoned when the currency overvaluation hits a certain threshold, unknown to the agents. Due to learning about the threshold...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Delayed Doves: MPC Voting Behaviour of Externals

The use of independent committees for the setting of interest rates, such as the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Bank of England, is quickly becoming the norm in developed economies. In this paper we examine the i...Read more...

Union Density and Varieties of Coverage: The Anatomy of Union Wage Effects in Germany

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily co...Read more...

CEP report

Interoperability and Market Foreclosure In the European Microsoft Case

In this paper we discuss some of the most important economic issues raised in European Commission vs. Microsoft (2004) concerning the market for work group servers. In our view, the most important economic issues relate ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment Outcomes in the Welfare State

We examine the implications of tax and subsidy policies for employment in the 'three worlds of welfare', Anglo-Saxon, Continental European and Scandinavian. We argue that home production is key to a proper evaluation of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Talking Less and Moving the Market More: Is this the Recipe for Monetary Policy Effectiveness? Evidence from the ECB and the Fed

This paper examines and compares the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, and their effectiveness. First we do a comparative study exercise. We find that on monetary policy commi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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 by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of p...Read more...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Intra-Industry Foreign Direct Investment

We use a new firm level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries—close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring Organization Capital in Japan: An Empirical Assessment Using Firm-Level Data

Globalization and the ICT revolution of the 1990s have forced many firms to reorganize in order to survive in a more competitive market. There are several approaches that can be used to assess the measurement of organiza...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wage Distributions by Bargaining Regime: Linked Employer-Employee Data Evidence from Germany

Using linked employer-employee data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey 2001, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of the wage structure in three wage-setting regimes prevalent in the German system of ind...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Division of Labor, Coordination, and the Demand for Information Processing

Since Adam Smith’s time, the division of labor in production has increased significantly, while information processing has become an important part of work. This paper examines whether the need to coordinate an increasin...Read more...

Manpower Human Resource Lab paper

Are There Day of the Week Productivity Effects?

Despite much debate about the productivity effects of flexible working and the regulation of working hours little attention is paid to temporal variance in productivity. This paper explains why one might expect to see pr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Imports and Exports at the Level of the Firm: Evidence from Belgium

This paper explores a newly-available panel data set merging balance sheet and international trade transaction data for Belgium. Both imports and exports appear to be highly concentrated among few firms and seem to have ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Chain Indices of the Cost of Living and the Path-Dependence Problem: An Empirical Solution

This paper proposes an empirically feasible method for correcting the path-dependence bias of chain indices of the cost of living. Chain indices are discrete approximations to Divisia indices and it is well known that th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Effect of Marital Breakup on the Income Distribution of Women with Children

Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a woman’s first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous variation to measure the effect of marital breakup on economic out...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Seigniorage

In this paper I analyse four different but related concepts, each of which highlights some aspect of the way in which the state acquires command over real resources through its ability to issue fiat money. They are (1) s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multi-Product Firms and Trade Liberalization

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level “ability” and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

An R&D-Based Model of Multi-Sector Growth

We develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model in which productivity growth is driven by the production of sector-specific knowledge. In the model, we find that long run differences in total factor productivity grow...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Panic on the Streets of London

The terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005 resulted in a very large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs. New research by Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt looks at the impact of this increased ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment and Hours of Work: The North Atlantic Divide Revisited

I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual Employee Voice: Renegotiation and Performance Management in Public Services

Periodically, the ‘zone of acceptance’ within which management may use its authority to direct employees’ work needs to be adapted to the changing needs of organisations. This article focuses especially on the non-codifi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trends in Hours and Economic Growth

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the structural transformation between agriculture, man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Co-Opetition and Prelaunch in Standard-Setting for Developing Technologies

Firms faced with the decision of whether to standardize or not prior to introducing a new network technology face a tradeoff: Compatibility improves the technology’s chances of consumer acceptance, but it also means havi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynastic Management

The most striking difference in corporate-governance arrangements between rich and poor countries is that the latter rely much more heavily on the dynastic family firm, where ownership and control are passed on from one ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multi-Product Firms and Product Switching

This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching among U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that two-thirds of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that on...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and Growth with Heterogeneous Firms

This paper explores the impact of trade on growth when firms are heterogeneous. We find that greater openness produces anti-and pro-growth effects. The Melitz-model selection effects raises the expected cost of introduci...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology, Information and the Decentralization of the Firm

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changes in Returns to Education in Latin America: the Role of Demand and Supply of Skills

Changes in the relative wages of workers with different amounts of education have profound implications for developing countries, where initial levels of inequality are often very high. In this paper we use micro data fo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Agricultural Returns and Conflict: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Policy Intervention Programme in Rwanda

In 1997 Rwanda introduced a re-settlement policy for refugees displaced during previous conflicts. We exploit geographic variation in the speed of implementation of this policy to investigate the impact of conflict-induc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multinationals and US Productivity Leadership: Evidence from Great Britain

We study the productivity of US owned plants in the UK. Using a new dataset that identifies foreign and domestic MNEs, we find that UK MNEs are less productive than US affiliates, but as productive as non US foreign affi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sinking the Blues: the Impact of Shop Closing Hours on Labor and Product Markets

There is a growing consensus among economists that extending shop opening hours creates jobs. While this is probably true in deregulating industries, this paper argues there are some deficiencies in the existing hypothes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reconciling Workless Measures at the Individual and Household Level: Theory and Evidence from the United States, Britain, Germany, Spain and Australia

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity, (polarisation), in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Two Sides to Every Story: Measuring the Polarisation of Work

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. This paper introduces a simple set of indices that...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Product Choice and Product Switching

This paper develops a model of endogenous product selection by firms. The theory is motivated by new evidence we present on the importance of product switching by U.S. manufacturers. Two-thirds of continuing firms change...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Scale Effects in Markets with Search

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-stru...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Inequality in Skills Explain Inequality of Earnings Across Advanced Countries?

The distribution of earnings and the distribution of skills vary widely among advanced countries, with the major English-speaking countries, the US, UK, and Canada, having much greater inequality in both earnings and ski...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labour Market Performance and Start-Up Costs: OECD Evidence

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the empirical literature explaining the rise of unemployment since the 1970s in western economies by means of interactions between shocks and institutions. The contributio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

City Size Distributions As A Consequence of the Growth Process

The size distribution of cities in many countries follows some broadly regular patterns. Any good theory of city size distributions should (i) be able to account for this regularity, but also (ii) rely on a plausible eco...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumption and Savings with Unemployment Risk: Implications for Optimal Employment Contracts

This paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. O...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Frustrated Demand for Unionisation: the Case of the United States and Canada Revisited

In this paper we demonstrate that there is a substantial union representation gap in the United States. We arrive at this conclusion by comparing Canadian and American worker responses to questions relating to desired un...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Zipfs Law for Cities: An Empirical Examination

We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 û 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Right to Know: Disclosure of Information for Collective Bargaining and Joint Consultation

The legal obligation on employers to provide information to employees has grown since the early 1970s. At that time, the emphasis was on disclosure for collective bargaining. In the 1980s and 1990s, the emphasis shifted ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Fallacy of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

It is not common for an entire scholarly literature to be based on a fallacy, that is, 'on faulty reasoning; misleading or unsound argument'. The 'fiscal theory of the price level', recently re-developed by Woodford,...Read more...