Results

CEP discussion paper

Gender, careers and peers' gender mix

We use Italian Social Security data to study how the gender composition of a worker's professional network influences their career development. By exploiting variation within firms, occupations, and labor market entry co...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics: Forthcoming

Are trade wars class wars? The importance of trade-induced horizontal inequality

What is the nature of the distributional effects of trade? This paper demonstrates conceptually and empirically the importance of “trade-induced horizontal inequality,” i.e. inequality that occurs among workers with the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neighborhood effects: Evidence from wartime destruction in London

We use the German bombing of London during the Second World War as an exogenous source of variation to provide evidence on neighborhood effects. We construct a newly-digitized dataset at the level of individual buildings...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

The Employment and Distributional Impacts of Nationwide Minimum Wage Changes

We estimate the effect of the introduction of the UK’s National Living Wage in 2016, and increases in it up to 2019, using a new empirical method. We apply a bunching approach to a setting with no geographical variation ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association :

Formation of College Plans: Expected Returns, Preferences and Adjustment Process

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study the formation, and updating, of educational plans, and to examine how these plans ultimately impact later educational attainment. Using novel, longitudinal, microdata on cohort...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics :

Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes

This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data on all public-school students i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The distributional effects of trade: Theory and evidence from the United States

How much do consumption patterns matter for the impact of international trade on inequality? In neoclassical trade models, the effects of trade shocks on consumers' purchasing power are governed by the shares of imports ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Peer pressure and manager pressure in organisations

We study the interaction between horizontal (peer) and vertical (manager) social factors in workers' motivation. In our setting, individuals work using open-plan desks. Using a natural experiment, we identify a sharp inc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are trade wars class wars? The importance of trade-induced horizontal inequality

What is the nature of the distributional effects of trade? This paper demonstrates conceptually and empirically the importance of "trade-induced horizontal inequality," i.e., inequality brought about by trade shocks that...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal: Forthcoming

Teacher effectiveness and classroom composition: understanding match effects in the classroom

This paper provides evidence of match effects in the teacher labour market by considering how teacher effectiveness varies by classroom composition. We combine random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Neighbors' effects on university enrollment

This paper provides causal evidence that close neighbors signigicantly influence potential applicants' decision to attend university. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and individual edu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Social policy gone bad educationally: unintended peer effects from transferred students

What is the impact of an increase of lower-ability students in a university class? We examine a natural experiment from Greece in which students from large, low-income families had the chance to transfer to academic prog...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Population Economics:

In medio stat victus: labor demand effects of an increase in the retirement age

After falling for four decades, statutory retirement ages are increasing in most OECD countries. The labor market adjustment to these reforms has not yet been thoroughly investigated by the literature. We draw on a major...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy :

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance: Forthcoming

The Effects of Parental Job Loss on Children’s Outcomes

Severe economic downturns are typically characterized by a high incidence of job losses. The available evidence suggests that job losers suffer short-run earning losses that persist in the long run, are more likely to re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm export responses to tariff hikes

We study how firms react to unexpected increases in import tariffs. We identify our results from a sudden removal of American preferential tariffs applied on Argentine imports under the Generalized System of Preferences,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

O brother, where start thou? Sibling spillovers on college and major choice in four countries

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger s...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Peer Effects and Social Influence in Post-16 Educational Choice

This paper investigates the impact of peers' ability on an individual's post-compulsory educational choices in terms of whether they select an academic route or a vocational route. In order to overcome the common problem...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Should I stay or should I go? Neighbors' effects on university enrollment

This paper investigates whether the decision to attend university depends on university enrollment of close neighbors. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and educational records from diff...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Quantifying the intangible impact of the Olympics using subjective well-being data

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in Lond...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the intangible impact of the Olympics using subjective well-being data

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in Lond...Read more...

Journal article

IZA Journal of Labor Economics:

Reallocation and the Role of Firm Composition Effects on Aggregate Wage Dynamics

Aggregate wages display little cyclicality compared to what a standard model would predict. Wage rigidities are an obvious candidate, but the existing literature has emphasized the need to take into account the growing i...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The causal effect of secondary school peers on educational aspirations

This paper uses data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) to investigate how the educational aspirations of secondary school pupils in Year 9 (at age 14) and in Year 11 (at age 16) are influence...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teacher effectiveness and classroom composition

This paper studies how the effectiveness of teachers varies by classroom composition, combining random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching practices based on a popular teacher-evaluation protocol. We fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

History dependence in the housing market

Using data on the universe of housing transactions in England and Wales over a twenty-year period, we document a robust pattern of history dependence in housing markets. Sale prices and selling propensities are affected ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fast track to growth? Railway access, population growth and local displacement in 19th century Switzerland

We study the effect of railway access on population growth in 19th century Switzerland. Our analysis is based on geo-referenced railway network information and an inconsequential units IV approach. Gaining direct railway...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How 'local' are local labour markets?

If we want to create jobs in disadvantaged local areas, the idea of ‘local’ needs to be revisited. Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo explain the problem of thinking of geographical space as non-overlapping single labou...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

It's time to learn: understanding the differences in returns to instruction time

As hours per day are inherently a limited resource, increasing daily instruction time reduces the amount of time pupils can dedicate to other activities outside school. We study how the effect of longer school days on ac...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic integration, foreign investment and international trade: the effects of membership of the European Union

This paper investigates the importance of economic integration in simultaneously fostering foreign direct investment (FDI) and international trade. These have rarely been analyzed jointly using contemporary econometric m...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Peer Effects and Social Influence in Post-16 Educational Choice

This paper investigates whether the educational choices that young people make after the completion of their GCSEs (at age 16) are influenced by their peers. More specifically, it takes advantage of the variation in peer...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Sorting and agglomeration economies in French economics departments

Are agglomeration and peer effects at stake in academic research? To tackle this question, we study how departments’ characteristics affect the quantity and quality of academics’ publications in economics in France, cont...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Traffic Externalities and Housing Prices: Evidence from the London Congestion Charge

This study exploits the introduction of the London Congestion Charge (CC) that greatly improves traffic conditions in Central London to provide new evidence on the capitalization of traffic externalities onto housing val...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Powering education

More than 1.3 billion people worldwide have no access to electricity and this has first-order effects on several development dimensions. In this paper we focus on the link between access to light and education. We random...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

Local agglomeration, entrepreneurship and the 2008 recession: Evidence from Italian industrial districts

We investigate whether the impact of recessions on entrepreneurship is affected by the presence of industrial districts, a source of local agglomeration economies. Using Italian Labour Force quarterly data from 2006 to 2...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Spatial Methods

This paper is concerned with methods for analysing spatial data. After initial discussion on the nature of spatial data, including the concept of randomness, we focus most of our attention on linear regression models tha...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Industry compensation under relocation risk: a firm-level analysis of the EU emissions trading scheme

When regulated firms are offered compensation to prevent them from relocating, efficiency requires that payments be distributed across firms so as to equalize marginal relocation probabilities, weighted by the damage cau...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...

CentrePiece article

Everybody needs good neighbours?

There are large disparities between the achievements, behaviour and aspirations of children in different neighbourhoods – but does this mean that the place where you grow up determines your later life outcomes? Steve Gib...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Top of the class

Boys may be better off not going to the school with high-performing peers, according to research by Richard Murphy and Felix Weinhardt, which explores how much impact there is on later confidence and exam results from wh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The importance of rank position

We find an individual’s rank within their reference group has effects on later objective outcomes. To evaluate the impact of local rank, we use a large administrative dataset tracking over two million students in England...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2013

The second World Happiness Report, released on Sept 9th 2013, further strengthens the case that well-being should be a critical component of how the world measures its economic and social development....Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... University exam results matter

As thousands of undergraduates across the UK take their exams, a study by Andy Feng and Georg Graetz reveals the importance of the results for subsequent earnings - specifically the value of a First compared with an Uppe...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

When the Cat is Near, the Mice Won't Play: The Effect of External Examiners in Italian Schools

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Do Homeowners Benefit Urban Neighborhoods? Evidence from Housing Prices

Homeownership is heavily subsidized in many countries mainly through the tax code. The adverse effects of lenient tax treatment of owner-occupied housing on economic efficiency and growth are large and well documented in...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

The good, the bad, and the average: evidence on ability peer effects in schools

We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers' ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our identification is based on ...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

Market Leadership Through Technology - Backward Compatibility in the U.S. Handheld Video Game Industry

The introduction of a new product generation forces incumbents in network industries to rebuild their installed base to maintain an advantage over potential entrants. We study if backward compatibility moderates this pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How Local Are Labour Markets? Evidence from a Spatial Job Search Model

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labour markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of nonoverlapping administrative...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Worktime Regulations and Spousal Labor Supply

We investigate cross-hour effects in spousal labor supply exploiting independent variation in hours worked generated by the introduction of the short workweek in France in the late 1990s. We find that female and male emp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Factor Proportions and International Business Cycles

Positive investment comovements across OECD economies as observed in the data are difficult to replicate in open-economy real business cycle models, but also vary substantially in degree for individual country-pairs. Thi...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

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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Where is the Economics in Spatial Econometrics?

Spatial econometrics has been criticized by some economists because some model specifications have been driven by data-analytic considerations rather than having a firm foundation in economic theory. In particular this a...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Plant-level Determinants of Total Factor Productivity in Great Britain, 1997-2006

This paper examines the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP) using a GB plant-level dataset. Using a systems-GMM approach, it considers the role of the following four plant characteristics: internal and extern...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours’ background characteristics and p...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours’ background characteristics and p...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does the Rotten Child Spoil His Companion? Spatial Peer Effects Among Children in Rural India

This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

To Join or Not to Join? Factors Influencing Employee Share Plan Membership in a Multinational Corporation

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidize the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Moving into the Projects: Social Housing Neighbourhoods and School Performance in England

This study estimates the effect of living in a very deprived neighbourhood, as identified by a high density of social housing, on the educational attainment of fourteen years old (9th grade) students in England. Neighbou...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Hot and Cold Seasons in the Housing Market

Every year during the second and thirdquarters (the “hot season”) housing markets in the UK and the US experience systematic above-trend increases in both prices and transactions. During the fourth and first quarters (th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Peer Effects in Science - Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathema...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Was Germany Ever United? Evidence from Intra- and International Trade 1885-1933

This paper asks whether Germany was ever an economically integrated area. I explore the geography of trade costs in a new data set of about 40,000 observations on regional trade flows within and across the borders of Ger...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the Extent of Re-Entitlement Effects in Unemployment Compensation

A dynamic labor matching economy is presented, in which the unemployed are either entitled to unemployment insurance (UI) or unemployment assistance (UA), and the employees are either eligible for UI or UA upon future se...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

When You Are Born Matters: The Imapct of Date of Birth on Child Cognitive Outcomes in England

Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is Distance Dying at Last? Falling Home Bias in Fixed Effects Models of Patent Citations

We examine the “home bias” of international knowledge spillovers as measured by the speed of patent citations (i.e. knowledge spreads slowly over international boundaries). We present the first compelling econometric evi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fat City: The Relationship Between Urban Sprawl and Obesity

We study the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Using data that tracks individuals over time, we find no evidence that urban sprawl causes obesity. We show that previous findings of a positive relationship mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Competing Technologies in the Database Management Systems Market

In this paper, we study the dynamics of the market for Database Management Systems (DBMS), which is commonly assumed to possess network effects and where there is still some viable competition in our study period, 2000 –...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Close Neighbours Matter: Neighbourhood Effects on Early Performance at School

Children’s outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar chara...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Peer Effects in European Primary Schools: Evidence from PIRLS

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with r...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Peer Effects and Pupil Attainment: Evidence from Secondary School Transition

It is a common belief that children will thrive if educated amongst better class and schoolmates. It is a belief that guides many parents in their choice of school, and has important implications for policy on school cho...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...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Evaluating the employment impact of a mandatory job search program

This paper exploits area-based piloting and age-related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program-the New Deal for Young People in the U.K. A central focus is on substitution/displacement ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Instrumental Variables for Binary Treatments with Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: A Simple Exposition

This note provides a simple exposition of what IV can and cannot estimate in a model with a binary treatment variable and heterogeneous treatment effects. It shows how linear IV is a misspecification of functional form a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neighbourhood Effects in Small Neighbourhoods

This paper uses data on a sample of Australian teenagers to test for neighbourhood effects on school dropout rates. The data allows us to test for neighbourhood effects at two different spatial scales. We find that educa...Read more...