Results

CentrePiece article

Take-away findings from food delivery apps

Do delivery apps reduce or enhance the attraction of cities?...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Polarisation is not a myth

Political views shape the creation and spread of technology...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The broken ladder: AI, remote work, and early-career hiring

Is generative AI replacing junior workers? A growing literature answers yes, citing large declines in early-career hiring concentrated in GenAI-exposed occupations. We argue that this verdict is premature because GenAI e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Skills, not scale: GenAI and technology adoption

Do the determinants of technology adoption depend on technological architecture? Using administrative data on Turkish firms from 2021 to 2024, we compare the adoption of traditional and generative artificial intelligence...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

AI unbound: digital infrastructure, AI adoption, and firm performance

We study how digital infrastructure relaxes constraints on the diffusion and economic impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Using administrative data and a nationally representative enterprise survey from Turkey (2021?...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology spillovers, diffusion and rivalry in firm networks

We examine how upstream firms' technology adoption affects the performance and adoption decisions of downstream partners. Using business-to-business data with administrative records on advanced technology adoption, we fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unpacking the restaurant experience: how food delivery technology favors the affluent urban core

We study how technological innovation has transformed the valuation of consumption services, using the sudden national expansion of food delivery services (FDS) in China as a natural experiment. Using a Bartik-style inst...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Great Recession affected millennial education and careers

In 2025 the proportion of young British people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training was at its highest since 2014. How much impact do educational choices made at that age have on future careers...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Anatomy of automation: CNC machines and industrial robots in UK manufacturing, 2005-2023

Using a novel proprietary survey of UK manufacturing sites, we study the impact on employment of arguably the two most important industrial automation technologies of the past fifty years: computer numerical control (CNC...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Private highs: investigating university overmatch among students from elite schools

Inequality in elite college attendance is a key driver of intergenerational mobility. This paper shifts the focus upstream to examine how elite high school attendance - specifically, enrollment in UK private, fee-paying ...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Human after all: occupations at the core of AI adoption

This paper investigates how firms? occupational structure shapes the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) using matched administrative data on French firms and relying on an instrumental variable Probit model. We ide...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...

Blog

Vox EU:

Export strength does not equal tech strength: Rethinking EU comparative advantage

Amid geopolitical shocks, the EU is revisiting its industrial strategy. However, traditional metrics often paint a misleading picture of Europe's underlying strength. This column uses a new approach to measure the EU's r...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

Academy of Social Sciences:

Policies to promote productivity and wage growth for less educated workers

In this piece, Professor Richard Blundell FAcSS, Professor Rachel Griffith FAcSS and Professor Sally McNally explore how improving educational outcomes for children growing up in deprivation, including social skills in t...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

De-tracking at the margin: How alternative secondary education pathways affect student attainment

This paper estimates how marginal increases in the flexibility of between-school tracking affect student attainment by exploiting the addition of non-selective `comprehensive schools? and hybrid `vocational high schools?...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Technology spillovers, diffusion, and rivalry in firm networks

Quantifying technology adoption, spillovers, and diffusion across firms is crucial for understanding industry dynamics, and in turn countries' growth. This column combines firm-level input-output VAT data from Turkey wit...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Britain needs nerds

Science, technological, mathematical and engineering (STEM) skills have been crucial to economic growth in the UK in the past, but how important are they to the adoption of the latest digital technologies such as AI? Mir...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Distance from innovation is a barrier to the adoption of artificial intelligence

While distance may seem unimportant in the face of technological progress in transportation and communication, several studies have found that distance is a barrier to the diffusion of inventive activity and technology a...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...

Blog

LSE EUROPP:

How China's rise has shaped innovation and exit among Europe's solar firms

Should the EU protect European firms by restricting imports of solar technology from China? Drawing on new research, Pia Andres finds that Chinese competition has resulted in many European firms going out of business, bu...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...

CEP discussion paper

Trade, skills and productivity

We examine how firms adjust their production and technology in response to exogenous trade shocks. We develop a model in which revenue TFP can be distinguished from quantity TFP, and where skill upgrading is explicitly e...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics:

Technology transfer in global value chains

Global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly exclud...Read more...

Journal article

Annual Review of Economics:

Industrial policy and the great divergence

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long nineteenth century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. States deployed a vast variety of different policies ai...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

Journal of Development Economics:

The deforestation effects of trade and agricultural productivity in Brazil

This paper quantifies the relative footprint of trade and agricultural productivity on deforestation across Brazilian municipalities between 2000 and 2017. Using remote-sensing data, we identify distinct effects of these...Read more...

Journal article

PLoS ONE:

Identifying technology clusters based on automated patent landscaping

We introduce a new general methodological approach for accurately and consistently retrieving a large set of patents related to specific technologies. We build upon the automated patent landscaping algorithm by incorpora...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... What girls study influences their offspring's health at birth

Educational reform can have a powerful impact on people's health with benefits for the next generation. Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz, Cristina Borra and Almudena Sevilla show how....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Induced innovation, inventors and the energy transition

We study how individual inventors respond to incentives to work on 'clean' electricity technologies. Using natural gas price variation, we estimate output and entry elasticities of inventors and measure the medium-term i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industrial policy and the great divergence

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different poli...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Adolescent development and the math gender gap

This paper investigates the determinants of the gap between girls and boys in mathematics performance (the 'math gap'). We are particularly interested in the role played by pubertal development in explaining the widening...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...

CentrePiece article

School qualifications and youth custody

Youth custody has severe long-term consequences for detained young people. Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela investigate the relationship between GCSE qualifications and youth custody, and find t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Parental education and the responses to higher SAT scores

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT system, we study the causal impact of additional admission opportunities on participation in higher education among high-ability students. Students with low-educated parents w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The causal impact of maternal educational curricula on infant health at birth

We provide the first causal evidence of the returns to maternal educational curricula on offspring's health at birth. Educational programs that aim to deliver more general knowledge may potentially improve women's earnin...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Globalization and pandemics

We provide theory and evidence on the relationship between globalization and pandemics. Business travel facilitates trade and travel leads to human interactions that transmit disease. Trade-motivated travel generates an ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

School qualifications and youth custody

A very small number of young people enter youth custody between age 16 and 18 (about 4 in 1000 males), yet the consequences are severe. They spend an average of 7 months in youth custody and such incarceration has been r...Read more...

Journal article

NEJM Catalyst:

The role of state policy in fostering health information exchange in the United States

It is widely agreed that health information sharing holds enormous potential to improve health care productivity. Although the adoption of electronic health records in the United States over the past 15 years has been im...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Does light touch cluster policy work? Evaluating the tech city programme

Cluster policies are popular with policymakers, but we know surprisingly little about their effectiveness. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a flagship UK technology cluster programme that uses `light touch?, mar...Read more...

Blog

Macroscope, South China Morning Post:

To become a world leader in innovation, China needs to loosen the economic reins

In a push for more tech breakthroughs, China is ramping up state spending on research and development. But without creating space for private sector innovation, China is unlikely to achieve the kind of results it wants....Read more...

Government consultation

Submission to the independent review of the UK Government's approach to net zero

Read more...

CentrePiece article

The impact of school closures on educational inequality

Nearly all schools closed at some point during the Covid-19 pandemic. Reviewing the international evidence to date on the impact of these closures, Jo Blanden, Matthias Doepke and Jan Stuhler warn that they will substant...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...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

How did safety-net reform affect the education of adolescents from low-income families?

Roughly 25 years ago, the US safety net was substantially reformed. Here we ask how those reforms affected the educational attainment of youths who were teens at the time those reforms took place. We take a difference-in...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Communication costs, science, and innovation

It seems obvious that lowering the cost of communication among innovators would facilitate scientific and technological progress. Yet, few studies examine this relationship. This column explores the introduction of the f...Read more...

Journal article

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science :

Modeling clusters from the ground up: a web data approach

This paper proposes a new methodological framework to identify economic clusters over space and time. We employ a unique open source dataset of geolocated and archived business webpages and interrogate them using Natural...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Education inequality

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic...Read more...

Journal article

Annual Review of Economics:

The impact of health information and communication technology on clinical quality, productivity, and workers

The adoption of health information and communication technology (HICT) has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivit...Read more...

CEP Insights

Jobs and wages

Most working-age adults depend on earnings from jobs as their main source of income. Understanding the labour market has always been a central part of research at CEP and its predecessor the Centre for Labour Economics....Read more...

CEP Insights

Productivity

Economics is the study of how to share out scarce resources. But it is also about how to make those resources less scarce by creating a bigger economic pie to share. The key to economic growth is increased productivity -...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge spillovers from clean and emerging technologies in the UK

The UK government has committed to increase R&D support for clean technologies in an effort to meet its net-zero target by 2050. The opportunity cost of such programs crucially depends on the value of knowledge spillover...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology transfer in global value chains

Firm-to-firm relationships in global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and in-put production tech...Read more...

Blog

Brookings:

Gone digital: technology diffusion in the digital era

Flavio Calvino and Chiara Criscuolo examine the reasons for low productivity growth in a period of fast advancement in technological progress and the spread of digital technologies....Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

'Potential capital', working from home, and economic resilience

Janice Eberly, Jonathan Haskel and Paul Mizen estimate the potential capital and labour saved through working from home that would otherwise have been lost during the Covid-19 pandemic....Read more...

Blog

Innovation Growth Lab:

Lessons on designing tech RCTs with SMEs

Capucine Riom, Anna Valero and Juliana Oliveira-Cunha look at how new technology based on artificial intelligence can be used to help small and medium-sized businesses improve productivity....Read more...

Journal article

Science and Public Policy:

Systems of innovation, diversification, and the R&D trap: a case study of Kuwait

The relationship between research and development (R&D) investment and economic development is well established. Yet, at a global scale, the resource-rich countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council are consistent outliers...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How new technology can help clinical quality, productivity, and the healthcare workforce

Health information and communication technology (HICT) holds enormous potential to improve productivity. Several countries, the UK and the US included, have embraced this idea and spent billions of dollars on promoting H...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Government policy fails to join the dots on the key challenges of innovation, net zero, and levelling up

Anna Valero writes that funding clean technologies, such as ocean and wind energy, can be a triple win, helping to address climate change, generating growth, and contributing to levelling up. Yet the 2021 Budget failed t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of healthcare IT on clinical quality, productivity and workers

Adoption of health information and communication technologies ('HICT') has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivit...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

How disruptive technologies diffuse

Nicholas Bloom, Tarek Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Josh Lerner, Ahmed Tahoun question how technical progress influences income and wealth inequality in the US and its affects on higher and lower-skilled hiring rates....Read more...

Journal article

German Economic Review:

Trade and the size distribution of firms: Evidence from the German Empire

What effect did trade have on the size distribution of firms during the first wave of globalization? Three historical datasets from the German Empire between 1875 and 1907 were collected and harmonized to answer this que...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation, growth and the transition to net-zero emissions

The climate crisis and the global economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis occur against a background of slowing growth and widening inequalities, which together imply an urgent need for a new environmentally sustainable a...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Working from home is revolutionising the UK labour market

Attitudes towards working from home have changed substantially since the start of the pandemic. This column discusses the findings from a survey of 5,000 working adults in the UK in January and February 2021, which sugge...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Increasing support for clean innovation: a win-win-win strategy?

Political support for government spending to deal with the economic aftermath of the COVID pandemic has grown. It is now greater than during the 2008 financial crisis, and 'build back better' pledges have multiplied. Ral...Read more...

Journal article

Canadian Journal of Economics:

On the interpretation of diploma wage effects estimated by regression discontinuity designs

Several recent papers employ regression discontinuity (RD) designs to estimate the causal effect of a diploma or similar credentials on wages. I build a model of knowledge acquisition, test-taking and labour market caree...Read more...

Blog

Institute for the Future of Work:

The impact of Covid-19 on technology adoption

Anna Valero and Professor John Van Reenen examine the evidence on technology adoption through the pandemic and what it means for the UK's future of work and productivity crisis. New evidence offers a basis for guarded te...Read more...

Blog

FE Week:

Why urgent support is needed to address UK skills deficit

New incentives are needed for businesses to train their employees for a post-Covid world, writes Guglielmo Ventura....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How leading economists view antitrust in the digital economy

US and European experts discuss internet giants, and Google's dominance of search and operating practices, writes Romesh Vaitilingam...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Gender, achievement, and subject choice in English education

In common with other OECD countries, there is a gender gap in educational achievement in England favouring girls. This carries through to tertiary education. On the other hand, boys are far more likely to engage in STEM ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Covid has forced many firms to innovate, with possible lasting impacts

A survey reveals greater UK innovation rates than what we might have expected in the absence of a pandemic, write Capucine Riom and Anna Valero....Read more...

Journal article

European Journal of Finance:

Is firm-level clean or dirty innovation valued more?

We examine how Tobin's Q is linked to 'clean' and 'dirty' innovation and innovation efficiency at the firm level. Clean innovation relates to patented technologies in areas such as renewable energy generation and electri...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Family background and the responses to higher SAT scores

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT system, we show that additional admission opportunities causally affect college choices. Students with high-educated parents change timing, colleges, and fields in ways that a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Disrupted schooling: impacts on achievement from the Chilean school occupations

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter ca...Read more...

Journal article

Heliyon:

Estimating the impact of the Internet of Things on productivity in Europe

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to interconnected devices and objects that collect and transmit data via the Internet. The IoT is an evolving technology, promising to revolutionise industries, but also demanding far-...Read more...

Journal article

Education Policy Analysis Archives:

Using global observation protocols to inform research on teaching effectiveness and school improvement: strengths and emerging limitations

An essential feature of many modern teacher observation protocols is their ?global? approach to measuring instruction. Global protocols provide a summary evaluation of multiple domains of instruction from observers? over...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor demand in the past, present and future

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. The...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Mismatched students and universities

Higher education has long been thought of as a tool to equalise opportunities. But according to research by Gill Wyness and colleagues, if we really want to improve the life chances of disadvantaged students, we need to ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Swings and silicon roundabouts: does cluster policy work?

Despite scepticism among researchers, policies to promote geographical clusters of firms in the same sector remain popular. Max Nathan evaluates a flagship programme set up a decade ago to accelerate the growth of Tech C...Read more...

Blog

LSE News:

Artificial intelligence could help protect victims of domestic violence

Ria Ivandic finds in the United States, roughly one in four women experience serious intimate partner violence over their lifetimes...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Public investment in defence research can increase business innovation

That doesn't mean that defence R&D is the most efficient way to stimulate private sector innovation and productivity, write Enrico Moretti, Claudia Steinwender and John van Reenen....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

Does light touch cluster policy work? Evaluating the tech city programme

Despite academic scepticism, cluster policies remain popular with policymakers. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a flagship UK technology cluster programme. I build a simple framework and identify effects using ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Inequalities in student to course match: evidence from linked administrative data

This paper examines inequalities in the match between student quality and university quality using linked administrative data from schools, universities and tax authorities. We analyse two measures of match at the univer...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology gaps, trade and income

This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level tech...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review: Insights:

Robot arithmetic: new technology and wages

Existing economic models show how new technology can cause large changes in relative wages and inequality. But there are also claims, based largely on verbal expositions, that new technology can harm workers on average o...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Protests as strategic games: experimental evidence from Hong Kong's antiauthoritarian movement

Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual's participation a function of their beliefs about others' turnout. We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates indivi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Europe's transformation after Gutenberg: the impact of new media and competition

Jeremiah Dittmar explores the effects of the printing press and the new forms of competition that accompanied its introduction....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New media and competition: printing and Europe's transformation after Gutenberg

We study the role of book content in economic, religious, and institutional development after the introduction of printing, and the role of competition in determining the amount and content of local printing. We focus on...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...

Journal article

Small Business Economics:

Entrepreneurship, institutional economics, and economic growth: an ecosystem perspective

We analyze conceptually and in an empirical counterpart the relationship between economic growth, factor inputs, institutions, and entrepreneurship. In particular, we investigate whether entrepreneurship and institutions...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Nursery attendance and children's outcomes

The UK government has expanded the popular `free entitlement? to part-time early education and care from a universal 15 hours per week to 30 hours per week for working parents. But research by Jo Blanden and co-authors r...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

A question of degree: the effects of degree class on labor market outcomes

How does performance at university affect labor market outcomes? Employing a regression discontinuity design, we show that university degree class causally affects graduatesa?? industry, wages, and earnings. Our sample c...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...

CEP discussion paper

Robot arithmetic: can new technology harm all workers or the average worker?

It is well-established that new technology can cause large changes in relative wages and inequality. But there are also claims, based largely on verbal expositions, that new technology will harm workers on average or eve...Read more...

Journal article

The World Economy:

Service trade and occupational tasks: an empirical investigation

Using microdata for Belgium, we investigate the relationship between changes in the task content of production and the rise in the number of service exporters. We show that occupational tasks changes display an extremely...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Career opportunities

Students? decisions about their education can be improved by providing them with more information, according to a report by Sandra McNally, which surveys the latest evidence on what advice is on offer and what works. She...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

The long-term effect of digital innovation on bank performance: an empirical study of SWIFT adoption in financial services

We examine the impact on bank performance of the adoption of SWIFT, a network-based technological infrastructure and set of standards for worldwide interbank telecommunication. We construct a new longitudinal dataset of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality in early years settings and children?s school achievement

Childcare quality is often thought to be important for influencing children?s subsequent attainment at school. The English Government regulates the quality of early education by setting minimum levels of qualifications f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the size distribution of firms: evidence from the German Empire

What is the effect of trade on the size distribution of firms? We collect historical data between 1882 and 1907 from the German Empire to address this question. Our data allow us to match three data sets according to the...Read more...