Results

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational income persistence in the Millennial generation

This paper provides new evidence on intergenerational income persistence for a recent UK cohort. Using Next Steps, a longitudinal study of people born in England in 1989-90 linked to administrative education records, we ...Read more...

Blog

Promarket:

American Slaveholders Lost Their Wealth but Kept Their Political Power

In new research, Luna Bellani, Anselm Hager, and Stephan Maurer examine how the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War affected the political influence of former slaveholders. Despite the blow to their economi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic effects of trade

The existence of aggregate welfare gains from trade is one of the classic insights from international economics. However, these conventional welfare gains are static, in the sense that they take existing factor supplies ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Endogenous mobility in pandemics: theory and evidence from the United States

We analyze infectious diseases in a general equilibrium model with endogenous mobility, where forward-looking agents weigh disease risks against economic opportunities in cross-regional mobility decisions. This generates...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Andy Burnham's biggest challenge isn't Britain's old class system - it's the new one

Britain's new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is more "Evertonian" than "Etonian", notes Lee Elliot Major: with his working class roots and political identity rooted in North West England, he marks a radical break with the...Read more...

Blog

Transforming Society:

Five myths of meritocracy in the modern workplace

We like to believe that modern workplaces are meritocratic. The best ideas rise to the top. Hard work pays off. The most capable people succeed. But our research reveals a more complicated reality, write Lee Elliot Major...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Are the upwardly mobile more left-wing?

It is well-known that the wealthier are less likely to have Left-leaning political preferences. In addition, we consider here the role of the individual's starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility...Read more...

Blog

HEPI:

The unseen ripples of human possibility: how undergraduate tutors could lead a new era of National Service

Lee Elliot Major argues for a national university volunteering service which could involve undergraduates tutoring pupils and spread to other forms of community action....Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Train to opportunity: the effect of infrastructure on intergenerational mobility

Can transport infrastructure expand long-term labour opportunities and weaken the occupational link between parents and children? We estimate the causal effect of railway access on occupational attainment and intergenera...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Making the invisible hand visible: managers and the allocation of workers to jobs

Why do managers matter for firm performance? This article provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

The causal effect of an income shock on children's human capital

We investigate the causal impact of a generous unconditional cash transfer at birth on children's health and academic performance. Using rich administrative data, we take advantage of the unexpected introduction of a ?ba...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Communications:

Social status and the relationship between income rank and well-being in 109 nations

Well-being is linked to income. However, lower well-being among lower-income individuals may reflect either economic relative deprivation or the lower social status associated with a lower income rank. Here, using Gallup...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Degrees of choice

Bolder applications mean that private school pupils end up at better universities than their exam results predict...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Liquidity as competitive advantage: the role of intangibles

We show that short-term liquidity can be a source of competitive advantage by enabling firms to invest in intangible assets. Our analysis leverages a French reform that capped payment delays in trade credit contracts, wh...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Bred to rule: What a A#180,000 private tutor job reveals about the education arms race

What does a A#180,000 job ad for a private tutor *for a baby* reveal about the global education arms race? It's tempting to put it down to the eccentric indulgence of a tiny global elite. But it in fact points to an expl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Nice work if you can get it? The distribution of employment and earnings during the early years of the clean energy transition

The transition to clean energy represents a fundamental and important shift in economic activity. We present new facts about workers in clean and legacy energy sectors between 2005 and 2019 using linked, administrative e...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Non-compete agreements, wages and efficiency: theory and evidence from Brazilian football

The Pele Act banned non-compete agreements in Brazilian football in 1998. We explore this policy change to study how non-competes affect the labour market. The Act changed the wage profile heterogeneously, reducing young...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Elite school students end up in better universities than expected, based on their grades

Students of private and grammar schools are over-represented in elite universities. While some of that is explained by better grades, therse is also a degree of mismatch between how well students do in exams and the qual...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Manipulation and selection in unemployment insurance

In this paper, we study the selection patterns of individuals who manage to have their lay-off delayed around an age at lay-off threshold entitling them to four additional months of unemployment insurance, that is, manip...Read more...

Journal article

Canadian Journal of Economics:

Evaluating the impact of export finance support on firm-level export performance: evidence from Pakistan

This paper evaluates the impact of two large export finance support schemes on firm-level export performance. The Export Finance Scheme (EFS) and the Long-Term Finance Facility for Plant & Machinery (LTFF) provide loans ...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Understanding the drivers of productivity: Capital

This blog is the second in our new series on the drivers of productivity. The drivers of productivity include skills, capital, innovation, enterprise and competition, and land. This blog focuses on capital, and complemen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Following in the family footsteps: Incidence and returns of occupational persistence

Children often follow their parents into the same occupations. However, evidence on the economic returns of occupational persistence is scarce and understanding these outcomes and their unequal prevalence across social s...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

The making of civic virtues: a school-based experiment in three countries

This paper shows that schools can foster the transmission of civic virtues by helping students to develop concrete, democratically chosen, collective projects. We draw on a RCT implemented in 200 middle schools in three ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

How does housing affect educational outcomes? Evidence from the UK's Right to Buy scheme

Right-to-Buy gave tenants of local authority owned 'council' houses the chance to own their home. The policy, which began in 1980, has been criticised for increasing inequality in the housing market, but Richard Disney a...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Monopsony and the wage effects of migration

If labour markets are competitive, migration can only affect native wages via marginal products. But under imperfect competition, migration may also increase wage mark-downs ? if firms have greater monopsony power over m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who is my neighbour? Short-term renting and civic engagement in London

Urbanization has transformed cities into the economic hubs of high-income countries, yet concerns about declining social capital persist. This paper investigates the impact of changes in neighbourhood composition on soci...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Fiscal and education spillovers from charter school expansion

Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from noncharter schools? We provide new evidence on the fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for noncharter students in Massachusetts, which...Read more...

CentrePiece article

in brief... How the Trump tariffs affect UK firms

How should UK exporters react to the tariffs imposed by President Trump? While some may start planning to increase production in the United States to avoid the tax, others whose US customers are less price-sensitive may ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The benefits of elite universities are more social than academic

From Cambridge and Oxford to Harvard and Yale, elite universities are a feature of many education systems. Andres Barrios Fernandez, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman ask whether these institutions of higher educati...Read more...

Government consultation

Social mobility policy

This submission argues for a new model of social mobility that recognises and values all forms of talent - academic, vocational, and creative - and helps people to lead decent lives, wherever they live, whatever their ba...Read more...

Government consultation

Social mobility policy committee

To ensure inclusivity in the post-16 education system, the government must guarantee a clear progression route for the "other 50 per cent" of young people who are not on the academic track. The government should introduc...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Trump tariffs affect UK firms

How should UK exporters react to the tariffs imposed by President Trump? Some manufacturers may decide to increase production in the US, but those with loyal US consumers who are relatively insensitive to price changes m...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Why sharing meals can make people happier - what evidence from 142 countries shows

The importance of sharing meals is recognised across cultures, from the Jewish Shabbat meal to the fast-breaking Iftar meals during Ramadan. The known link between food and social relationships is ancient. The English wo...Read more...

Government consultation

Education committee - Further education and skills

The further education sector is currently navigating a series of reforms and challenges. In this inquiry the Education Committee will explore these issues and other pressures currently facing the further education sector...Read more...

Blog

IMF Finance and Development magazine :

Innovation's Unseen Frontier

Notwithstanding Plato's 2,400-year-old proverb, necessity alone is not the mother of invention. It also requires opportunity. An individual's likelihood of becoming an innovator reflects parental background in terms of i...Read more...

Blog

The We Society:

Improving social mobility through education and language with Lee Elliot Major (podcast)

Professor Lee Elliot Major joins Will Hutton to discuss the decline of social mobility in the UK and advocates for a broader understanding of systemic barriers, including arguing for a new approach towards language to im...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Human capital from childhood exposure to homeownership: evidence from Right-to-Buy

"Right to Buy" (RTB) was a large-scale UK housing policy whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy their properties at heavily subsidised prices. The policy increased the national homeownership rate by over 1...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and intergenerational income mobility: theory and evidence from the US

This paper studies how globalization influences intergenerational income mobility. We develop a dynamic economic geography model with overlapping generations, migration costs, and sectoral persistence. The model shows th...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Ethnic minority and migrant pay gaps over the life-cycle

It is well-known that ethnic minority and migrant workers have lower average pay than the White UK-born workforce. However, we know much less about how these gaps vary over the life-cycle because of data limitations. We ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The role of human capital for AI adoption: evidence from French firms

We leverage a uniquely comprehensive combination of data sources to explore the enabling role of human capital in fostering the adoption of predictive AI systems in French firms. Using a causal estimation approach, we sh...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Has work from home shifted the US electoral map?

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

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

Education and geographical mobility: the role of the job surplus

Better educated workers accept many more long-distance job offers, and relocate quicker following local shocks. I attribute this to a fundamental feature of their labor market experience, unrelated to geography: large re...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The unequal health effects of smart tech in the workplace

How does technological progress affect workers' health? Melanie Arntz, Sebastian Findeisen, Stephan Maurer and Oliver Schlenker explore the effects of digitalisation and find evidence of worsening health among manual wor...Read more...

Government consultation

Industry and Regulators Committee

I am an economist who has worked (on and off) on post-school education for many years. From 1961-64 I was senior Research Officer to the Robbins Committee. In 1994 I co-edited Britain's Training Deficit. From 1997-2001 I...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The new wave? The role of human capital and STEM skills in technology adoption in the UK

Which types of human capital influence the adoption of advanced technologies? We study the skill biased adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) across two waves in the UK. Specifically, we compare th...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Sliding down the Great Gatsby curve in search of the Scandinavian dream

The new UK government has separate missions to break down the barriers to opportunity and to boost growth - together, the "Scandinavian dream". The problem, write Steve Machin and Lee Elliot Major, is Britain's high leve...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Capital-skill complementarity in firms and in the aggregate economy

We study capital-skill complementarity in a multi-sector framework featuring firm-specific, multi-factor production functions. We characterize the elasticity of the skill premium to the price of capital equipment in term...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating the impact of export finance support on firm-level export performance: evidence from Pakistan

This paper evaluates the impact of two large export finance support schemes on firm-level export performance. The Export Finance Scheme (EFS) and the Long-Term Finance Facility for Plant & Machinery (LTFF), provide loans...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Elite universities and the intergenerational transmission of human and social capital

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, ...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Open Economics:

Labour market inequality

Wage and earnings inequality has been on the rise in the United Kingdom (UK) since the late 1970s/early 1980s, and with faster increases than comparator countries, it is now one of the countries with the highest levels o...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Further and higher education

There are not enough graduates for sectors in which the UK has a comparative advantage and there are too few people educated to sub-degree level compared to other countries....Read more...

CEP election analysis

Schools

Schools in England, and the UK as a whole, need greater investment. Failure to do so puts economic growth in jeopardy as well as worsening social mobility....Read more...

CentrePiece article

in brief... Why representation in economics matters

To inspire the next generation of black economists, how important is it for them to see people like themselves working in the profession? Felicia Odamtten, an economist at the Resolution Foundation and founder of The Bla...Read more...

CentrePiece article

A generation scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic

The impact of the pandemic on education means that pupils in England are on course for lower GCSE grades well into the 2030s. Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite and Stephen Machin say that the school system ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accounting for the evolution of China's production and trade patterns

This paper studies the evolution of China's production and trade patterns during its integration into the global economy. We document and explain new facts concerning changes in production and exports at the industry and...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Taking back control? Quasi-experimental evidence on the impact of retirement on locus of control

We use Australian panel data to examine the impact of retirement on individual locus of control, a socio-emotional skill with substantial explanatory power for a broad range of life outcomes. Exploiting the eligibility a...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization:

Noncompete agreements in a rigid labor market: the case of Italy

Noncompete agreements limiting the mobility of workers have been found to be widespread in the United States, a flexible and lightly regulated labor market. We explore the use of noncompete agreements in a rigid and high...Read more...

External report

A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era

We present for the first time a model of children's evolving socio-emotional and cognitive skills to assess how the educational and lifetime prospects of children of different ages, genders and socio-economic backgrounds...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

A class apart: prime ministers' origins profoundly impact their political worldviews

The background of our Prime Ministers hugely influences the judgements they make. Yet our leaders are drawn from an astonishingly narrow slice of society: every PM who attended an English university since WW2 went to Oxf...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Intergenerational income mobility in France: A comparative and geographic analysis

The question of the extent to which individuals' incomes are related to those of their parents has seen renewed interest as rising income inequality raises concerns about equality of opportunity. Gustave Kenedi and Louis...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Finance:

Tracing the international transmission of a crisis through multinational firms

We show that multinational firms transmit shocks across countries through their internal capital markets. We study a credit supply shock to parent firms in Germany. International affiliates outside Germany supported thei...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...

Blog

LSE EUROPP:

Online tutoring can transform education for disadvantaged students

Online tutoring programmes have emerged as an effective strategy for narrowing the educational gaps that were exacerbated by the pandemic. Claudia Hupkau, Lucas Gortazar and Antonio Roldan-Mones outline how an eight-week...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are we yet sick of new technologies? The unequal health effects of digitalization

This study quantifies the relationship between workplace digitalization, i.e., the increasing use of frontier technologies, and workers' health outcomes using novel and representative German linked employer-employee data...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Using disasters to estimate the impact of uncertainty

Uncertainty rises in recessions and falls in booms. But what is the causal relationship? We construct cross-country panel data on stock market returns to proxy for first- and second-moment shocks and instrument these wit...Read more...

Blog

Wonkhe:

The spiralling costs of higher education are hitting stay at home students harder

Commuter students face financial struggle and a growing sense of isolation from campus. Lee Elliot Major introduces the findings of a new student money and wellbeing survey....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Do publicly funded autonomous schools improve education systems in the world?

In recent decades, many countries have established autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools. Natalie Irmert, Jan Bietenbeck, Linn Mattisson and Felix We...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Ending stagnation

What can be done to address Britain?s relative economic decline over the past decade and a half? The final report of the Economy 2030 Inquiry presents an ambitious strategy for reversing decades of under-investment, by t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Endogenous mobility in pandemics: theory and evidence from the United States

We study infectious diseases in a spatial epidemiology model with forward-looking individuals who weigh disease environments against economic opportunities when moving across regions. This endogenous mobility allows regi...Read more...

CEP Insights

Insights: condensed

The Insights series is an introduction to the work of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). Each Insight highlights the contribution of CEP researchers to both academic understanding and policymaking in one area of ...Read more...

Blog

Higher Education Policy Institute:

Confronting higher education's class divide

Lee Elliot Major explains why developing an equity approach in higher education is the only way we will ever level the learning playing field - and lays out three simple steps we can take to achieve this....Read more...

Journal article

PLoS ONE :

Access to digital finance: Equity crowdfunding across countries and platforms

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neoclassical growth in an interdependent world

We generalize the closed-economy neoclassical growth model (CNGM) to allow for costly goods trade and capital flows with imperfect substitutability between countries. We develop a tractable, multi-country, quantitative m...Read more...

External report

Ending stagnation

The UK has great strengths, but is a decade and a half into a period of stagnation. The toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was straining the living standards of low- and middle-income Britain well befor...Read more...

Blog

Project Syndicate:

What to do about Ukraine's brain drain

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 fuelled migration on a scale unseen since World War II, leaving 15 per cent of the population residing outside the country to this day. When Ukraine eventually gets the chanc...Read more...

Blog

South-West Social Mobility Commission's Substack:

Fixing a broken tongue

Lee Elliot Major explains why the language we use in education is important to challenge the divides that scar the education system....Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review :

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Youth custody: who ends up there and how does it affect their later lives?

There are severe long-term consequences for young people in the UK who spend time in youth custody, the majority of whom are boys. Those with very low grades, in special education facilities and with additional education...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Trends in effort at work in the UK

This article links detailed 24-h diary surveys in the UK for the last four decades, to provide evidence of an increase in work effort in three specific dimensions: timing, nature, and composition. We rule out certain pro...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Scars of war

Deaths of soldiers in wartime naturally have a powerful impact on the communities from which they come. Research by Edward Pinchbeck, Felipe Carozzi and Luca Repetto reveals how losses in the first world war have reverbe...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The rising tide of school absences in the post-pandemic era

New research reveals that school attendance in the UK is still well below the pre-pandemic norm. Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite and Lee Elliot Major outline the scale of continued absenteeism among pupils across the count...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Working life and human capital investment: causal evidence from a pension reform

In this paper, we analyze if an increase in the working life leads to more human capital investment via on-the-job training. We obtain RDD-estimates from a sharp date-of-birth cut-off, generated by a pension reform that ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The evolution of work from home

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20?64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the bi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Scars of war: the legacy of WW1 deaths on civic capital and combat motivation

What drives soldiers to risk their life in combat? We show that the legacy of war creates lasting conditions that encourage younger generations to take greater risks when fighting for their country. Using individual-leve...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish thi...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Individual consequences of occupational decline

We assess the career earnings losses that individual Swedish workers suffered when their occupations' employment declined. High-quality data allow us to overcome sorting into declining occupations on various attributes, ...Read more...

CEP Insights

Social mobility

How much of an individual's success depends on their own hard work and how much on what their parents do for a living? A country where children from poor families are likely to be poor as adults and elite positions in so...Read more...

Blog

FE News:

The childcare revolution: a new opportunity for parental partnerships in child learning

Lee Elliot Major discusses how teacher-parent partnerships can help make the UK's childcare system more effective and provides three policy recommendations the government can implement....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are the upwardly mobile more left-wing?

It is well-known that the wealthier are more likely to have Right-leaning political preferences. We here in addition consider the role of the individual's starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The long shadow of local decline: birthplace economic adversity and long-term individual outcomes in the UK

Does growing up in a high-economic adversity area matter for individual economic, cultural, and political views? Despite a significant focus upon the effect of birthplace on economic outcomes, there is less evidence on h...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The rising tide of school absences in the post-pandemic era

While many presumed school attendance levels would recover rapidly from the impact of the pandemic, new research reveals the scale of continued absenteeism among school pupils across the country. Andrew Eyles, Esme Lilly...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The dynamics of the 'Great Gatsby Curve' and a look at the curve during the Great Gatsby era

We use linked historical US censuses to study the empirical relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. We first confirm that the 'Great Gatsby Curve' already existed in the early 20th century. We the...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Which educational policies are most effective for equalising opportunities?

Against a backdrop of poor productivity growth, severe skill shortages and increasing educational inequalities in the UK since the pandemic, investment in education and skills is essential. It requires policies that span...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Mapping changes in educational achievement across England

As part of the LSE Festival 2023, the Mapping People and Change exhibition visualises data through maps on various socio-economic issues, providing insights into the impact of a rapidly changing world on people and commu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Imperfect signals

A pre-condition for employer learning is that signals at labor market entry do not fully reveal graduates' productivity. I model various distinct sources of signal imperfection - such as noise and multi-dimensional types...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The local labor market effects of modern manufacturing capital: evidence from France

Using an event study methodology and comprehensive micro data from the French manufacturing sector, we analyze the local labor market effects of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation te...Read more...

Book

Free and Equal
What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

Imagine: you are designing a society, but you don't know who you'll be within it - rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like? This is the revolutionary thought experiment...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The signaling value of legal form in debt financing

We examine if a startup's legal form choice is used as a signal by credit providers to infer its risk to default on a loan. We propose that choosing a legal form with low minimum capital requirements signals higher defau...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Economic Inequality:

Intergenerational home ownership

This paper studies intergenerational links in home ownership, an increasingly important wealth marker and a measure of economic status in itself. Repeated cross sectional UK data show that home ownership rates have falle...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Modern manufacturing capital, labor demand and product market dynamics: evidence from France

We use comprehensive micro data in the French manufacturing sector between 1995 and 2017 to document the effects of a fall in the cost of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation technolog...Read more...