Results

CEP occasional paper

UK national productivity trends: getting the data right

We compare standard productivity estimates of UK output per worker derived from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) with newly released estimates based on more reliable "Real Time Information" (RTI) administrative data. LFS-ba...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

GRAPH-EE: building employer - employee panels from a knowledge graph and company microdata

Linked employer-employee datasets are a hugely powerful tool for researchers and policymakers across the social sciences. However, access to such data is typically highly restricted and the quality of data varies substan...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Economics:

Firm climate investment: a glass half-full

The green transition will require large investments from firms, yet little is known about the scale and drivers of climate-related capital expenditure across the UK economy. To address this gap, we draw on a large, repre...Read more...

Journal article

International Economics:

Reassessing EU comparative advantage: the role of technology

Based on a sufficient statistics approach, we show how the state of technology of European industries relative to the rest of the world can be empirically assessed in a way that is simple in terms of computation, parsimo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm-level technology adoption in times of crisis

We investigate the diffusion of frontier technologies across German firms before and during the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations behind technology investments, usi...Read more...

Blog

MIT Sloan Management Review:

Reskilling the Workforce With AI: Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun (podcast)

Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun's research has historically focused on digital reskilling. Now, rapid technological changes - like AI - are reshaping the nature of work. Raffaella's research has explore...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Cultural homophily and collaboration in superstar teams

One may reasonably think that cultural homophily, defined as the tendency to associate with others of similar culture, affects collaboration in multinational teams in general but not in superstar teams of professionals a...Read more...

Journal article

International Review of Financial Analysis :

Does it matter who owns firms? Evidence on the impact of supermajority control on private firms in Europe

We explore how the type of owner affects private enterprise investment decisions in Europe. In contrast to the literature, we analyze firms with concentrated (>95%) ownership stakes to reduce the potential that agency pr...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

How polarised are citizens? Measuring ideology from the ground-up

We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political ...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

A new dataset to study a century of innovation in Europe and in the US

Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Understanding multi-layered sanctions: a firm-level analysis

This paper examines which types of firms are hit by multi-layered sanctions, quantifies the extent of the economic impact on the affected firms, and identifies the channels through which these effects are propagated. To ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge spillovers from clean innovation. A tradeoff between growth and climate?

Innovation policy faces a tradeoff between growth and climate objectives when the knowledge spillover externality from clean innovation is low compared to other sectors. To make such a comparison, we use patent data to e...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Global value chains and domestic innovation

This paper explores how changes in both position and participation in Global Value Chain (GVC) networks affect firm innovation. The analysis combines matched patent-firm data for Japan with measures of GVC network centra...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics :

Micro-geographic property price and rent indices

We develop a programming algorithm that predicts a balanced-panel mix-adjusted house price index for arbitrary spatial units from repeated cross-sections of geocoded micro data. The algorithm combines parametric and non-...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Clean technologies for growth and equity

Public investment in developing energy sources that don?t cause climate change is a strategy for economic growth that could also contribute to the UK?s levelling up agenda, says Ralf Martin. His analysis indicates that s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cultural homophily and collaboration in superstar teams

One may reasonably think that cultural preferences affect collaboration in multinational teams in general, but not in superstar teams of professionals at the top of their industry. We reject this hypothesis by creating a...Read more...

Journal article

Energy for Sustainable Development :

Assessing reliability of electricity grid services from space: the case of Uttar Pradesh, India

While most households around the world have access to electricity, the number of hours per day when the grid supplies them with adequate voltage can be low. Improving the reliability of electricity is crucial to make pro...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics:

Blame it on the rain: rainfall variability, consumption smoothing, and subjective well-being in rural Ethiopia

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi...Read more...

Journal article

Education Economics:

A comparison of earnings related to higher technical and academic education

Not much is known about higher technical education in England, but current education policy looks positively at it to improve labour productivity and social mobility. We provide updated estimates of individual earnings d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

AI-tocracy

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Data-intensive innovation and the State: evidence from AI firms in China

Artificial intelligence (AI) innovation is data-intensive. States have historically collected large amounts of data, which is now being used by AI firms. Gathering comprehensive information on firms and government procur...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economic Studies:

A reply to Campbell and Mau

In Bloom et al. (2016, Bloom, Draca and Van Reenen (BDVR)), we have a set of nine results on the impact of Chinese trade. The first three showed that Chinese trade increased technical change in European firms measured by...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We h...Read more...

Journal article

Information Processing and Management:

Machine learning classification of entrepreneurs in British historical census data

This paper presents a binary classification of entrepreneurs in British historical data based on the recent availability of big data from the I-CeM dataset. The main task of the paper is to attribute an employment status...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The value of progression in further education

In this study, we investigate the value of progression associated with different vocational qualifications disaggregated by subject area of study. Previous analyses of labour market outcomes by subject of study demonstra...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Labour market outcomes disaggregated by subject area using the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between labour market outcomes and vocational qualifications disaggregated by subject area of study. Using individuals holding vocational qualifications in any subject at th...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

A comparison of earnings related to higher level vocational/technical and academic education

Using rich administrative data for a full cohort of English secondary school leavers (2002/03 academic year), we compare earnings of people with higher vocational/technical qualifications to the earnings of degree holder...Read more...

Blog

CVER Blog:

Higher vocational education: An alternative to degrees?

A detailed picture of earnings effects of university degrees is emerging, but not much is known about the benefits of higher vocational education. A recent report by the IFS provides evidence on the extensive earnings b...Read more...

Journal article

Urban Studies:

Does the law of one price hold for hedonic prices?

Hedonic prices of locational attributes in urban land markets are determined by a process of spatial arbitrage that is similar to that which underpins the law of one price. If hedonic prices deviate from their spatial eq...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Settling the counterfactual debate: Is there a preferable counterfactual when estimating the returns to vocational qualifications?

Using information from the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data set, it is now possible to compare the characteristics and estimates for learners with different qualifications encompassing both types of counterfact...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

The distribution of talent across contests

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants? To what extent do contestants avoid competition? We show that the distribution of abilities is crucial in determining contest choice. Complete so...Read more...

CVER Briefing Note

Further analysis of the earnings differentials associated with BTECs

We analyse whether there is an earnings differential associated with having a BTEC qualification as a young person?s highest qualification. Previous analyses of wage differentials using survey data on a sample of all wor...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The Payoff to Vocational Qualifications: Reconciling Estimates from Survey and Administrative Data

This paper takes as a starting point the wage/earnings differentials associated with vocational qualifications that have been estimated in the literature. Two distinct parts of that literature are identified, using surve...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The earnings differentials associated with vocational education and training using the Longitudinal Education Outcomes data

For the first time, the matched Longitudinal Education Outcomes has been made available for analysis of qualification attainment and labour market outcomes in England. Using comprehensive information from different schoo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average of adulthood. We her...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The loss of production work: evidence from quasi-experimental identification of labour demand functions

This paper examines changes in the structure of labour demand in plant-level panel data. I exploit variation in wages across local labour markets induced by the collapse of Finland?s Soviet-dependent industry in the earl...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Geography of City Liveliness and Land Use Configurations: Evidence from Location-Based Big Data in Beijing

This paper explores the complexity in the connection between city liveliness and land use configurations for housing and consumption amenities. The sources of this complexity are captured by an integrated spatial and tem...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Carbon taxes, path dependency, and directed technical change: evidence from the auto industry

Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between ?dirty? (internal combustion engine) and ?clean? (e.g., electric, ...Read more...

External report

Measuring competitiveness in Europe: resource allocation, granularity and trade:

The importance of micro data in assessing aggregate outcomes

In recent years, researchers and policymakers have been able to use sophisticated databases to provide insightful economic analysis. The increasing variety of available microeconomic databases and the improvement in the ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Spatial exporters

In this paper, we provide causal evidence that firms serve new markets which are geographically close to their prior export destinations with a higher probability than standard gravity models predict. We quantify the imp...Read more...

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...

CEP report

Internationalization and Innovation of Firms: Evidence and Policy

We use a representative and cross-country comparable sample of manufacturing firms (EFIGE) to document patterns of interaction among firm-level internationalization, innovation and productivity across seven European coun...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Exporters

In this paper, we provide causal evidence that firms serve new markets which are geographically close to their prior export destinations with a higher probability than standard gravity models predict. We quantify the imp...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Estimating and Forecasting with a Dynamic Spatial Panel Data Model

This paper focuses on the estimation and predictive performance of several estimators for the dynamic and autoregressive spatial lag panel data model with spatially correlated disturbances. In the spirit of Arellano and ...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Is Fiscal Decentralization Harmful for Economic Growth? Evidence from the OECD Countries

The global drive towards decentralization has been increasingly justified on the basis that greater transfers of resources to subnational governments are expected to deliver greater efficiency in the provision of public ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Predicting the Geography of House Prices

Prediction is difficult. In this paper we use panel data methods to make reasonably accurate shortterm ex-post predictions of house prices across 353 local authority areas in England. The issue of prediction over the lon...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New Approaches to Measuring Management and Firm Organization

We detail the methodology that we have been using to quantify managerial and organizational practices across firms and countries in recent years. This has been used in many pieces of research at the Centre for Economic P...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Fluctuating Record of Economic Regeneration in England's Second-Order City Regions, 1984-2007

This study examines how far and in what way `Our cities are back?, as claimed by England?s Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984-2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city regions: Birmingham, Brist...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Productivity and Firm Selection: Quantifying the 'New' Gains from Trade

We discuss how standard computable equilibrium models of trade policy can be enriched with selection effects without missing other important channels of adjustment. This is achieved by estimating and simulating a partial...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Analysing the Impact of Public Capital Stock Using the NEG Wage Equation: A Panel Data Approach

This paper examines the relationship between the level of public infrastructure and the level of productivity using panel data for the Spanish provinces over the period 1984-2004, a period which is particularly relevant ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Prediction Using Panel Data Regression with Spatial Random Effects

This paper considers some of the issues and difficulties relating to the use of spatial panel data regression in prediction, illustrated by the effects of mass immigration on wages and income levels in local authority ar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Growth and the Quality of Foreign Direct Investment: Is All FDI Equal?

In this paper we distinguish different ?qualities? of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. We use `quality? to mean the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth. However this is difficult to estab...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Search Frictions, Real Rigidities and Inflation Dynamics

The standard New Keynesian model suffers from the so-called .macro-micro pricing conflict: in order to match the dynamics of inflation implied by macroeconomic data, the model needs to assume an average duration of price...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational Mobility and the Informative Content of Surnames

We propose an alternative method for measuring intergenerational mobility. Traditional methods based on panel data provide measurements that are scarce, difficult to compare across countries and almost impossible to get ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Central Bank Announcements on Asset Prices in Real Time: Testing the Efficiency of the Euribor Futures Market

This paper examines the effect of European Central Bank communication on the price discovery process in the Euribor futures market using a new tick-by-tick dataset. First, we show that two pieces of news systematically h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalisation, ICT and the Nitty Gritty of Plant Level Datasets

The net entry contribution to aggregate productivity growth has increased dramatically in the UK over 1990s according to calculations based on data from the Annual Respondents Database (ARD). Some recent studies have tri...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

Minimum Wages and Employment

This paper investigates the effect of minimum wages on employment using a panel of US state-based data. We estimate a minimalist dynamic version of the specification implied by neo-classical theory. We find statistically...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fixed-Term Contracts and the Duration Distribution of Unemployment

In the mid-1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then their labor markets have become more dynamic. This paper studies the implications of such reforms for the duration distribution of une...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Factor Residuals in SUR Regressions: Estimating Panels Allowing for Cross Sectional Correlation

This paper describes a method for estimating panels by imposing a factor structure on the residuals. The method allows SUR estimation of panel models by providing a full-rank estimator of the system covariance matrix whe...Read more...