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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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Flooded cities

Does economic activity relocate away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which are among the costliest and most common natural disasters. Over the past...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The upside of London Tube strikes

In February 2014, strikes by staff on London's underground network enabled a sizeable fraction of commuters to find better routes, according to research by Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems. Many commuters w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The benefits of forced experimentation: striking evidence from the London Underground network

We estimate that a significant fraction of commuters on the London underground do not travel their optimal route. Consequently, a tube strike (which forced many commuters to experiment with new routes) taught commuters a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Task Specialization in U.S. Cities from 1880-2000

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro-data from t...Read more...