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Blog

Vox EU:

Distributional consumer price indices and the measurement of inequality

Differences in consumption patterns between lower- and higher-income households suggest the potential for inflation inequality, but evidence on the scale and drivers of this disparity remains scarce. This column uses 'di...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Five facts about MPCs: evidence from a randomized experiment

We present five facts from an experiment on the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of transitory transfers: (1) the one-month MPC on a cash-like transfer is 23 percent; (2) it is substantially higher (61 percent) o...Read more...

Journal article

PNAS:

How working from home reshapes cities

In recent decades, economic activity has become increasingly concentrated in major global metropolises. Yet, the rise of working from home threatens this dominance of cities. Using multiple high-frequency datasets on spe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Valuing consumption services as technology transforms accessibility: Evidence from Beijing

Home delivery reduced the value of cities as locations to access variety in durable consumption goods. Food delivery services (FDS) are doing the same for restaurants. Home-streaming of sports or home-delivered restauran...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Firm inflation expectations in quantitative and text data

Inflation rates and short-term inflation expectations in the UK have increased significantly since 2021. This column uses quantitative and text data from the Decision Maker Panel to analyse the factors affecting inflatio...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Econometrics:

Surveying business uncertainty

We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Nonparametric measurement of long-run growth in consumer welfare

How should we measure long-run changes in consumer welfare? This paper proposes a nonparametric approach that is valid under arbitrary preferences that depend on observable consumer characteristics, e.g. when expenditure...Read more...

Chapter

Post-Brexit imports, supply chains, and the effect on consumer prices

in The Economics of Brexit: What Have We Learned?

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CEP discussion paper

Expecting Brexit

The Brexit vote precipitated the unravelling of the UK's membership of the world's deepest economic integration agreement. This paper reviews evidence on the realized economic effects of Brexit. The 2016 Brexit referendu...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Market tremors: Shale gas exploration, earthquakes, and their impact on house prices

Shale gas has grown to become a major new source of energy in countries around the globe. While its importance for energy supply is well recognized, there has also been public concern over potential risks from hydraulic ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Prices and inflation in the UK - A new dataset

This paper presents a new dataset of 41 million UK consumer prices, providing facts on the frequency, size and timing of price changes between 1988 and 2020. The micro data are the `price quotes? of individual consumer p...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

School choice during a period of radical school reform. Evidence from academy conversion in England

We study how demand responds to the rebranding of existing state schools as autonomous 'academies' in the context of a radical and large-scale reform to the English education system. The academy programme encouraged scho...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The cost of being young: measuring intergenerational consumer prices

The UK's young adults are navigating a very different economic landscape to earlier generations, including low real wage growth, lower likelihood of owning their own home and the uncertain prospects of Brexit. Rahat Sidd...Read more...

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Measuring aggregate price indices with taste shocks: theory and evidence for CES preferences

We develop an approach to measuring the cost of living for CES preferences that treats demand shocks as taste shocks that are equivalent to price shocks. In the presence of relative taste shocks, the Sato-Vartia price in...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...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Fear of fracking: the impact on UK house prices

Shale gas offers the prospect of a low-cost energy future ? but does extracting it invoke anxieties about the possibility of environmental catastrophe among local residents? Research by Steve Gibbons and colleagues detec...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Fear of Fracking? The Impact of the Shale Gas Exploration on House Prices in Britain

Shale gas has grown to become a major new source of energy in countries around the globe. While its importance for energy supply is well recognized, there has also been public concern over potential risks ? such as dama...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... Bargain hunters: calculating the benefits of consumer search

To what extent can shoppers convert the time they spend looking for particular products into monetary savings? The authors use electronic tags to study the behaviour of 12,000 consumers in a large supermarket in Northern...Read more...

CentrePiece article

What makes consumers switch mobile phone tariffs?

The potential psychological pain of nasty surprises on mobile phone bills is a great motivator to switch tariffs, according to research by Christos Genakos and colleagues. Their study notes that navigating through thousa...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

Loss aversion on the phone

We analyze consumer switching between mobile tariff plans using consumer-level panel data. Consumers receive reminders from a specialist price-comparison website about the precise amount they could save by switching to a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumer search: evidence from path-tracking data

We estimate the effect of consumer search on the price of the purchased product in a physical store environment. We implement the analysis using a unique data set obtained from radio frequency identification tags, which ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Victorian internet: the trade impact of the transatlantic telegraph

The telegraph was the Victorian equivalent of today?s `big data?, helping firms to forecast future demand. Analysing such unique historical `experiments? helps understand how firms and markets respond when new technology...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Culturally Clustered or in the Cloud? Location of Internet Start-ups in Berlin

Knowledge based firms like IT companies do neither have a capital- nor a land intensive production. They predominantly rely on qualified labour and increasingly depend on the location of its (potential) employees. This i...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urbanity

I define a composite amenity that provides aesthetic and consumption value to local residents: Urbanity. A novel data set of geo-tagged photos shared in internet communities serves as a proxy for urbanity. From the spati...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Access All Areas? The Impact of Fees and Background on Student Demand for Postgraduate Higher Education in the UK

This paper analyses participation in postgraduate higher education in the UK at the micro-level makes several contributions to the literature. Firstly, it describes trends in postgraduate participation in the UK. Secondl...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Accounting for Big City Growth in Low Paid Occupations: Immigration and/or Service Class Consumption

Growth of 'global cities' in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarisation, including growth of low paid service jobs. Though held to be untrue for European cities, at the time, some such growth di...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Cotton and cars: the huge gains from process innovation

New inventions are good for economic growth, but equally important are improvements in the way we make things - what's known as process innovation. Tim Leunig and Joachim Voth measure the impact of two such innovations -...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incomplete Contracts and the Impact of Globalization on Consumer Welfare

We embed a North-South trade model into an incomplete contracts setting where the production of heterogeneous firms can be geographically separated. When a Northern headquarter contracts with a Southern supplier instead ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spinning Welfare: the Gains from Process Innovation in Cotton and Car Production

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently econo...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Local Human Capital and Its Impact on Local Employment Chances in Britain

This paper examines how high human capital in a locality is associated with the employment outcomes of individuals. A probit model is used to examine how the employment probability of otherwise similar working age males ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Wage Effects from Changes in Local Human Capital in Britain

This paper examines the wage effects arising from changing local human capital in the labour market areas of Britain. Employing wage regressions, it is found that individuals? wages are positively associated with changes...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...