Results

Journal article

Labour Economics:

The effect of preserving job matches during a crisis

It is generally difficult to measure the importance of preserving worker-firm relationships, particularly for low-wage jobs that involve general skills. The COVID-19 pandemic led to the sudden and seemingly temporary dis...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Gender gaps from labour market shocks

Many workers will face unemployment at some point during their careers and research shows that job loss can lead to persistently lower earnings. But that research is chiefly about men. Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Wages and vacancy duration

In a dynamic labour market, employer market power is jointly determined by the entry and exit margins of labour supply - ie the extent to which higher wages ease recruitment and improve rentention. Ihsaan Bassier, Alan M...Read more...

Blog

LSE Review of Books:

Creative destruction for growth and change

John Van Reenen introduces his new book, The Economics of Creative Destruction, co-edited with Ufuk Akcigit, which explores how technological innovation can be used to drive growth and tackle problems from inequality to ...Read more...

External publication

Ready for change

Britain's productivity shortfall is its foundational economic problem. Debate about this gap and how to fix it typically focus on raising productivity of existing firms, via two routes. First, innovation: investment, R&D...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

What can house prices tell us about the environmental costs of overhead power lines?

The transition to green energy requires many new electrical power lines to be constructed. In the UK, this construction is a contentious planning and political issue. Steve Gibbons and Cheng Keat Tang show the local cost...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Are the self-employed trapped?

Still affected by the cost-of-living crisis, the self-employed are still struggling to recover their finances and mental health. Many of them would leave for a salaried job, yet they appear to be stuck in self-employment...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

The self-employment trap?

The seventh LSE-CEP survey of the self-employed was undertaken in June 2023. The results revealed that the self-employed are still in the doldrums and their incomes and activity have not resumed to pre-pandemic levels. T...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Forward-looking labour supply responses to changes in pension wealth

As populations age, the strain on government budgets will keep pension reform at the forefront of political campaigns and policy debates worldwide. Elisabeth Artmann, Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln and Giulia Giupponi analyse ho...Read more...

Blog

The News Agents:

Is this Sunak's 'moment of shame'? (podcast)

Rishi Sunak was propelled into explaining his new position in a hastily arranged press conference after details of plans to adjust (water down) his commitment to green policies were leaked to the BBC. Anna Valero and Lor...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The UK should lead on a green industrial strategy not roll back

The UK government appears to be watering down its commitments to net zero, breaking the cross-party consensus on the need for Britain to lead in the global battle against climate change. Yet now is the time to double dow...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Christopher Pissarides: 'The more I study AI, the more optimistic I get about the labour market'

The rapid developments in artificial intelligence have been causing fears that many jobs will disappear. But Christopher Pissarides sees reason for optimism. In this Q&A with Maayan Arad, he says that the need to deal wi...Read more...

External publication

A tale of two cities (part 1)

After the success of the Commonwealth Games in 2022, Birmingham is now in the news for the wrong reasons. Financial difficulties facing the City Council culminated in a formal declaration on 5 September 2023 that Britain...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Brazil's comparative advantage in soybean production triggered deforestation

Tropical ecosystems house an immense biomass, which makes it imperative to understand how they are affected by technology and trade. Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa examine the Brazilian rainforest's...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What explains the gender division of labour and how can it be redressed?

Adam Smith's division of labour was about the efficiency gains from task specialisation in factories. But the gender division - gaps between men and women in pay, prestige, career progression and much more - can also be ...Read more...

Blog

LSE iQ:

Is AI coming for our jobs? (podcast)

Maayan Arad speaks to experts about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the courtroom, and what might happen if robots take over the roles of judges. And explore how journalism and other professional fields could be affected...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

What are spatial disparities?

Henry Overman explains what spatial disparities are, why we need to consider them when thinking about local economic growth policies and whether we should try to reduce them....Read more...

Book

The Economics of Creative Destruction
New Research on Themes from Aghion and Howitt

A stellar cast of economists examines the roles of creative destruction in addressing today’s most important political and social questions. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant while rents accumulate, the env...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vacancy duration and wages

We estimate the elasticity of vacancy duration with respect to posted wages, using data from the near-universe of online job adverts in the United Kingdom. Our research design identifies duration elasticities by leveragi...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

Reskilling in the age of AI

As the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge. To learn more about wha...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why business groups (think Samsung or Tata Group) have an export advantage in emerging markets

With their superior access to capital, knowledge and labour, business groups offer many advantages to their affiliated firms. Daniel Shapiro, Saul Estrin, Michael Carney and Zhixiang (Steven) Liang write that these advan...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Firms' required returns to capital and the missing investment puzzle

Despite falling interest rates over the past decades, investment rates have not increased as standard economic theory would suggest. Niels Joachim Gormsen and Kilian Huber construct a global database of firm discount rat...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

More education signals ability to employers, but does it really improve skills?

Better educated workers may earn higher wages for two possible reasons: because they acquire more skills or because more education signals their intellect and enthusiasm. Economists believe that signalling plays a role a...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...

CEP occasional paper

The trouble with inactivity

Elevated concerns over the consequences of recent rises in the UK economic inactivity rate for growth, wages and prices have prominently featured in recent public debate about the labour market and the economy. This pape...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact of Social Sciences:

New approaches to economics research are reshaping how we understand and respond to gender stereotypes

New ways of analysing data from images and text are being used by economists to study discrimination in the labour market. A recent workshop, hosted by the Centre for Economic Performance and the Department of Social Pol...Read more...

Blog

VoxTalks Economics:

Is green growth possible? (Podcast)

Is innovation our best hope for dealing with climate change and, if so, how can we stimulate the sort of innovation that we need to make the green energy transition? Philippe Aghion tells Tim Phillips that we need both c...Read more...

Blog

Trade Talks:

Did responsible sourcing by multinationals help workers in poor countries? (podcast)

A series of industrial accidents that killed workers in the supply chains of multinational corporations triggered backlash by Western consumers. In response, many global companies committed to treat workers in poor count...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Remote work across jobs, companies and space

The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure and characterize this shift, we examine more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a st...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Journal article

IMF Economic Review: Forthcoming

Jobless and stuck: youth unemployment and Covid-19 in India

Youth unemployment is a big challenge in developing economies, but there is a limited understanding of the dynamics underlying the rise in unemployment among young workers. This article examines youth unemployment and in...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The supply chain for electric car batteries is changing the world's geopolitics

The rising demand for electric vehicles is changing the geopolitical landscape, as the world pivots away from fossil fuels towards the materials critical to the EV supply chain. As manufacturers and countries race to sec...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Competition and pass-through: lessons from the Greek islands

Although theoretical analysis shows that competition is a key determinant of how firms pass through changes in tax rates to consumers, empirical evidence is scant. This column explores changes in the excise duty on petro...Read more...

External publication

Beyond boosterism

The UK is a low investment nation. Low business investment is a big driver of this. Low investment is one reason behind the UK's weak productivity growth, which in turn is the main reason behind the stagnation in UK livi...Read more...

CEP report

Seizing sustainable growth opportunities from tidal stream energy in the UK

This is the decade for managing the immense risks of climate change, and delivery on net zero. That means rapidly increasing the share of renewable sources in our energy mix alongside a step-change in energy and resource...Read more...

CentrePiece article

CEP Insights: Gender and...

CEP research on gender and factors such as family, work and Covid-19....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Superstar firms: how the shift from manufacturing to services affects local concentration of sales and jobs

The leading US firms in many industries have increased their national market share substantially over the last four decades - making these industries more concentrated. But locally the picture is more complex. David Auto...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Improving the lives of low-paid workers

The ramping up of the national minimum wage since 2015 has more than halved the share of low-paid employees in Britain. But it is far from job done: too few low-paying jobs offer dignity, respect and security to the peop...Read more...

External publication

Trading up

After nearly half a century of EU membership, Britain needs a trade strategy. The stakes are high: such a strategy shapes what families and firms buy from abroad, and what gets produced domestically; influences our jobs,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The shift to remote work lessens wage-growth pressure

The recent shift to remote work raised the amenity value of employment. As compensation adjusts to share the amenity-value gains with employers, wage-growth pressures moderate. We find empirical support for this mechanis...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Fostering innovation for climate neutrality

Achieving climate neutrality will require cost reductions and the rapid diffusion of existing technologies, as well as innovation in new technologies. Mario Cervantes, Chiara Criscuolo, Antoine Dechezlepretre and Dirk Pi...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Should the UK government get active about economic inactivity?

Concerns about a rise in economic inactivity have prompted new policies aimed at discouraging early retirement and encouraging the labour force participation of women with young children. Such interventions would be more...Read more...

Blog

LSE USAPP:

The 1918 flu pandemic made some people more religious, and others, more innovative.

Enrico Berkes, Davide Coluccia, Gaia Dossi and Mara Squicciarini investigate whether a destructive event - such as a pandemic - leads to either an increase in religiosity or a boost in innovation efforts. They find that ...Read more...

Blog

LSE:

Why has productivity in the UK slowed? (video)

Growth and productivity are often talked about in UK politics but how are they linked and what effect do they have on the economy? John Van Reenen explains....Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Frontline stories: protecting biodiversity

Ahead of COP26 in 2021, Richard Davies talked to Dr Jane Goodall DBE, one of the world's leading environmentalists, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a United Nations Messenger of Peace....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Creditors use startups' choice of legal form as a signal for debt financing

Formal debt financing is an important source of external financing for startups, but creditors face information gaps, as startups lack a proven track record. Felix Bracht, Jeroen Mahieu and Steven Vanhaverbeke argue that...Read more...

Chapter

The What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth: some lessons from the first ten years

in The What Works Centres: lessons and insights from an evidence movement

What can policy do to increase local economic growth? This is a question that has challenged decision makers and academics for decades. It's also a fundamental question today, when the UK government has made economic gro...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance:

Do Carbon Prices Affect Stock Prices?

Patrick Bolton, Adrian Lam and Mirabelle Muuls discuss whether the EU cap-and-trade system has resulted in a signficant financial impact on the companies that are under the scheme and whether it has motivated them to red...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

What does the evidence say on place-based intervention for net zero?

Will Brett-Harding discusses the existing evidence on place-based intervention for net zero, in light of the global climate crisis and the magnitude of the damage that will, or already has, come with it....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Local and national concentration trends in jobs and sales: the role of structural transformation

National U.S. industrial concentration rose between 1992-2017. Simultaneously, the Herfindhahl Index of local (six-digit-NAICS by county) employment concentration fell. This divergence between national and local employme...Read more...

External publication

Low pay Britain 2023

After a decade and a half of relative economic decline, Britain needs a new economic strategy. This paper considers what it would mean to put good work centre stage. It requires us to go far beyond the narrow focus this ...Read more...

Blog

LSE USAPP:

Citizen complaints can be a useful early warning system for governments to act on environmental violations.

Is enabling citizens to complain about public services an effective way of improving government services, or should we be more concerned about their accuracy and reliability? In new research, Jonathan Colmer, Mary Evans,...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Using job postings to quantify remote work

The COVID pandemic initiated an enduring shift to remote work. But there is little evidence to explain where this shift is taking place at a micro level because the sample sizes are too small. Stephen Hansen, Peter Lambe...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Left-behind versus unequal places: interpersonal inequality, economic decline and the rise of populism in the USA and Europe

Economic change over the past 20 years has rendered many individuals and territories vulnerable, leading to greater interpersonal and interterritorial inequality. This rising inequality is seen as a root cause of populis...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Local concentration and structural transformation

The national market shares of the leading US firms in many industries have risen substantially over the last four decades - ie, these industries have become more concentrated. David Autor, Christina Patterson and John Va...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Non-compete agreements in a rigid labour market: the case of Italy

Non-compete clauses (NCCs) limiting the mobility of workers have been found to be rather widespread in the US, a flexible labour market with large turnover rates and a limited coverage of collective bargaining. This pape...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why it's so difficult for companies to leave Russia

After the start of Russia's war on Ukraine, many multinational companies have announced their intention to leave Russia. Despite the pressure from numerous stakeholders, including Western governments, few companies have ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

A budget for (green) growth? Unfortunately, not yet.

In light of the climate crisis, the energy and cost-of-living crises, and longstanding productivity problems urgently needed addressing, the Spring 2023 Budget was a key moment for the government to make progress in prov...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Train in vain? Skills, tasks, and training in the UK labour market

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt pledged that measures in the budget would help break down barriers that stop people working. One issue is how to ensure we have the skills the economy needs. Nye Cominetti, Rui Costa, Andrew Eyles,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productive robots and industrial employment: the role of national innovation systems

In a model with robots, and automatable and non-automatable human tasks, we examine robot-labour substitutions and show how they are influenced by a country's 'innovation system'. Substitution depends on demand and produ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Tangible or intangible investment, that is the question: Owner type and investment of private firms

Family business owners are often said to be risk averse, while corporate and institutional owners are less so. Saul Estrin, Jan Hanousek and Anastasiya Shamshur analyse how investment decisions vary across ownership type...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

How women are changing the face of economics

Economics continues to be a discipline dominated by men. Yet trailblazing female economists are working to change that. Myung Jin explains why it is important to improve diversity and equality within the field....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Women in the workplace: 50 years of change

Decades of progress have seen greater opportunities for women in the workplace, but sizeable gender gaps remain in most indicators of economic achievement. Stefania Albanesi, Claudia Olivetti, and Barbara Petrongolo revi...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The paradox of vocational education

Despite a UK labour market that is hungry for skills, academic education has triumphed over training, apprenticeships and preparation for specific occupations. Alison Wolf looks at why vocational education continues to l...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Automation creates the space for entirely new jobs: the UK must adopt, adapt and improve

Fears about robots taking people's jobs are overplayed, say Rui Costa and Yuanhang Yu. Their research shows the real fear to overcome should be Britain's lack of productivity-enhancing robots, software, artificial intell...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Radical climate policies

The transition to net zero will require policies that promote switching to carbon-free technologies on a large scale and will often involve complementarities and peer effects in demand. Frederick van der Ploeg and Anthon...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Studies: Forthcoming

Inclusive innovation in cities: from buzzword to policy

'Inclusive innovation' has become an increasingly important subnational policy agenda. This paper reviews this agenda, critiques its current usage and presents a new framework for how the concept can be applied by city g...Read more...

CentrePiece article

CEP Insights: Wellbeing

The CEP carries out policy-focused research on the causes of economic growth and effective ways to create a fair, inclusive and sustainable society. The Insights series highlights the contributions that CEP research has ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Growth and immigration: unpicking the confusion

More people in a country leads to a bigger economy, but not necessarily an improved standard of living. Alan Manning unpicks the complexities in the debate....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Why have energy bills been rising?

The UK has been particularly exposed to the global energy crisis - partly due to the country's dependence on gas for heating and electricity generation, and partly its poorly insulated housing stock. After predictions th...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Adopt, adapt and improve

Fears about robots taking people’s jobs are overplayed, say Rui Costa and Yuanhang Yu. Their Economy 2030 Inquiry briefing shows the real fear to overcome should be Britain’s lack of productivity-enhancing robots, softwa...Read more...

Chapter

Life cycle assessment of recycling systems

in Roadmap for a sustainable circular economy in lithium-ion and future battery technologies

The market dynamics, and their impact on a future circular economy for lithium-ion batteries (LIB), are presented in this roadmap, with safety as an integral consideration throughout the life cycle. At the point of end-o...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Does active travel have local economic benefits?

Active travel involves making journeys by physically active means such as walking and cycling. While the link to emissions is obvious, we know less about the local economic impacts. Anamaria Tibocha-Nino and Will Brett-H...Read more...

Blog

Promarket:

The Case for Green Industrial Policy

Industrial policy was once so old-fashioned that it was jokingly called "the policy that shall not be named". Now it's back in a big way. On issues ranging from clean energy to semiconductors to Covid-19, governments are...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution

To what extent the wealth derived from slavery contributed to Europe's economic growth has been a hotly debated question for more than two centuries. Most economists studying the question have looked at national aggregat...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Self-employment dwindles amid the cost-of-living crisis

As the Covid-19 crisis has made way for inflation and skyrocketing energy prices, the self-employed have not yet found their way out of the recent economic adversities. And many of them are now finding their way out of s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Import competition, trade credit and financial frictions in general equilibrium

We analyze the role of trade credit and financial frictions in the propagation of international trade shocks along the supply chain. First, we show empirically that exposure to import competition from China increased the...Read more...

Submission to a parliamentary inquiry and government consultation

Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee - UK plc 2050 (non-inquiry session)

The session examines what policies could restore competitiveness and address the country's intractable productivity and regional inequality problems while also reaching net zero....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why older talent should be a consideration for today's inclusive leader

While 'age' has not been historically underrepresented in our workforces, creating longer, fulfilling working lives is now an economic imperative. Daniel Jolles and Grace Lordan break down three persistent myths about ol...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How might changes in student visa provision affect UK immigration levels?

Net migration to the UK has reached record highs. International students are included in the immigration statistics and the government has implied it may seek to limit their future numbers. More research is needed to des...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The labour market in Ukraine: Rebuild better

Rebuilding Ukraine will require emergency measures that address the effects of war alongside structural reforms that address pre-existing political and economic issues. Giacomo Anastasia, Tito Boeri, Marianna Kudlyak and...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Commute time savings when working from home

The large shift to work from home during the Covid-19 pandemic reduced the amount of time that workers spend commuting. This column reports on a global survey of workers in 27 countries showing that working from home sav...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Pay inequality is high in South Africa: bosses are part of the problem

South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This income inequality is mostly due to high unemployment and large differences in wages. In South Africa today, economists and policy-makers typically foc...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

UTOPIA and the City: the future of work in financial and professional services

In the midst of a reorganisation of work caused by the pandemic, there is no one-size-fits-all arrangement and employers are battling to find the right mix between office and home working. To learn more about how to get ...Read more...

Blog

ProMarket:

A New Framework for Better Industrial Policies

Chiara Criscuolo and Guy Lalanne provide a new, conceptual framework for better industrial policy, considering topical areas such as clean energy, Covid-19, and performance of key business sectors....Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The family consequences of job insecurity: Fertility and marriage

Fertility rates have fallen sharply in OECD countries over the last 60 years, a drop mirrored in diminished employment protection over the same period. This column asks whether this greater job insecurity has contributed...Read more...

Journal article

Economie et Statistique :

Recruitment difficulties and firms' characteristics: an analysis of French company data

This article uses a survey conducted in 2019 among companies in the manufacturing sector on recruitment difficulties they may encounter. By linking this information with the companies' income statements, we show that the...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economic Studies : Forthcoming

Subsidizing labor hoarding in recessions: the employment & welfare effects of short time work

Short-time work (STW) policies provide subsidies for hour reductions to workers in firms experiencing temporary shocks. They are the main policy tool used to support labour hoarding during downturns and were aggressively...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Responsible sourcing: Theory and evidence from Costa Rica

There is growing pressure on multinational enterprises to implement 'responsible sourcing' requirements for their suppliers in low- and middle-income countries. These include minimum standards on working conditions, such...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The Recent Evolution of Apprenticeships: participation and pathways

The number of apprenticeship starts in England has reduced dramatically in recent years following government reforms and the COVID-19 pandemic. The composition has also shifted from almost complete domination by low and ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics of the Household :

Marriage as insurance: job protection and job insecurity in France

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it. We here consider marriage as a way of insuring against labour-market risk. The 199...Read more...

Blog

BBC Radio 4:

Understand The Economy: 7. Jobs and Unemployment (podcast)

What happens when lots of people lose their jobs? Why might wages be low even though everyone who wants a job, has one? What do we mean by employment and unemployment and what does 'economic inactivity' mean? What is pro...Read more...

Blog

The Diplomat:

Asia's Development Model Is Now Jeopardizing Its Future Economic Growth

Asia is facing an economic watershed moment. Turning the corner will require rethinking the role of its dominant, state-supported business groups....Read more...

Blog

The ECB Blog:

Can Europe be a green innovation leader?

Europe is punching below its weight in the climate-technology competition. The continent needs to facilitate risk capital markets and to invest more in research and development. This is the 4th post in a series of climat...Read more...

Blog

CVER Blog:

On Track to Success? Returns to Vocational Education against different alternatives

In the wake of Brexit and the global pandemic, skills shortages across the UK economy risk hampering efforts to reverse a decade of languishing productivity and festering inequality. Reinvigorating the long-neglected Bri...Read more...

External publication

Adopt, adapt and improve

Worries that jobs will be lost to automation are not new, but have been heightened since the release of Frey and Osborne's 2013 study, which warned that nearly half of jobs in the US were at 'high risk' of automation. Ne...Read more...

Chapter

Firms and finance during the green transition

in Scaling up sustainable finance and investment in the global south

Creating economically and politically legitimate solutions to tackle climate change is one of the most pressing and challenging issues of our time. For emerging and developing economies, the task is made more difficult d...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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

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...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy :

Why have energy bills in the UK been rising?

The UK is particularly exposed to the energy crisis sweeping across the world. After predictions that annual household bills were due to rise from around £1,000 to £3,500 in October 2022, the government announced it woul...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Supporting the UK’s self-employed

Two years after the Covid-19 crisis began, incomes of the UK’s self-employed remain well below their pre-pandemic levels. Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura explain why the solo self-employed, who represent about 85% of ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Stagnation nation

Even before the cost of living crisis, a toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was threatening UK living standards, particularly for families on low and middle incomes. The Economy 2030 Inquiry is examinin...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...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Investment Zones: who benefits?

In this final blog of the week's series on Investment Zones, Henry Overman highlights issues local and national governments may face as they negotiate, such as substitution of jobs, leakage, and who benefits from Investm...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Fighting climate change: International attitudes toward climate policies

Climate policies to limit global warming have often been difficult to pass and implement. In exploring the policy preferences of over 40,000 people in 20 high- and middle-income countries, the authors find that whether p...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Investment Zones, deadweight, and displacement

Following his previous blog on bidding for Investment Zones in the UK and that it should be a 'no-brainer', Henry Overman outlines in detail the existing theory and evidence on deadweight and displacement - two core issu...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Investment Zones: bid now, reflect later

With just three days left to draft initial bids for Investment Zones around the UK, Henry Overman addresses questions and concerns of some local areas still asking whether they should be bidding to host zones. Given the ...Read more...

Blog

LSE:

Inflation: the energy crisis explained (video)

Rising energy bills drive up the cost of living. LSE's Anna Valero explains what led to the current energy crisis and how the transition to net zero emissions will help. ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Working from home around the world

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a surge in working from home. This big shift has endured and is likely to continue, even after the pandemic. This column reports that employees value the option to work from home 2-3 days ...Read more...

Journal article

The World Economy: Forthcoming

The electric vehicle revolution: critical material supply chains, trade and development

The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers development opportunities for countries that have abundant resources of cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium and manganese. Not surprisingly, develo...Read more...

Blog

CEPR & VideoVox Economics:

Why do some regions fail to recover from economic shocks? (video)

Recorded at CEPR's June Paris Symposium, Tony Venables presents his research on those regional disparities in the UK which originated in the 1970s through negative trade and technology shocks and whose long run consequen...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

The UK economic crisis might not be a one-off

Markets have reacted poorly to the UK government's new "mini-budget" combining energy price caps with tax cuts for the well off. The government's search for a quick fix to economic growth is a mistake. In fact, restartin...Read more...

Blog

SDG Action:

Stimulating innovation for net zero

New technologies will play a vital role in achieving net zero. Getting them on stream and in widespread use fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe calls for bold and urgent action to unblock essential investment....Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Research into 1930s commuting in London shows how public transport boosts the labour market

An argument to justify public transport closures has often been lack of profitability for the service provider. However, Andrew J. Seltzer and Jonathan Wadsworth find that such discussions often miss much of the full val...Read more...

Journal article

Feminist Economics :

Career and family: women's century-long journey toward equity

The main argument in Claudia Goldin's new book, Career and Family, is that "greedy jobs" are the main obstacle for an economy to complete the last stage of the gender revolution: women's equality in the labor market and ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Is inflation avoidable?

Inflation in the UK is at a 40 year high, with prices rising across the economy. Shoppers can look for cheaper products, but many are already buying the lowest-cost options and the prices of those bargains are going up f...Read more...

Journal article

Applied Energy:

Optimising the geospatial configuration of a future lithium-ion battery recycling industry in the transition to electric vehicles and a circular economy

Rapid electrification of the transport system will generate substantial volumes of Lithium-ion-battery (LiB) waste as batteries reach their end-of-life. Much attention focuses on the recycling processes, neglecting a bro...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Minimum wages and living wages: what happens in times of inflation?

It is widely accepted that minimum wages are an effective way to help workers at the lower end of the income distribution without damaging their job opportunities. But while the UK's minimum wage has risen faster than th...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How to future-proof your career

The job market is in constant flux; industries change or become obsolete and new technologies emerge and disrupt. In conversation with Jasmine Virhia, Grace Lordan explains what strategies we can put in place now to make...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Britain, a services superpower sinking into stagnation

British households have low levels of financial resilience and are forecast a sluggish living standards recovery coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, Britain is the result of an economy defined by the low grow...Read more...

Blog

IFS Explainer:

Why is inequality in the labour market growing? (video)

The world of work is changing. There have been huge shifts in the kinds of work we do and the types of organisations we work for. What has been happening to inequalities in the UK's labour market? What have been the imp...Read more...

Chapter

Research and innovation policies for the green transition

in Science, research and innovation performance of the EU 2022

This chapter provides a selective review of policies that can help foster a transition towards green technologies. R&I are crucial to tackling sustainability challenges, and public policies are needed to direct technolog...Read more...

CEP Insights

Crime

What can economics tell us about crime? Economists have discovered that young people who leave school during a recession are more likely to end up in prison than those who enter the labour market when the economy is buoy...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Falling behind, the self-employed would sacrifice 10% of their income for an insurance scheme

Two years after the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, incomes of the self-employed in the UK are still well below their pre-pandemic levels. The number of self-employed workers dropped during the crisis and has not yet r...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed - A two year update

The fifth LSE-CEP survey of the self-employed of May 2022 provides an up to date picture of how Covid-19 and its aftermath keep affecting the self-employed. The findings show that, although working on average a little mo...Read more...

Blog

The Overview:

Has the pandemic changed the workplace forever? (podcast)

Millions of US workers are quitting or changing jobs in an ongoing trend dubbed the Great Resignation. With job vacancies rising to record highs on both sides of the Atlantic, is the UK also facing a resignations surge? ...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...

External publication

Stagnation nation: navigating a route to a fairer and more prosperous Britain

The UK has great strengths, but is over a decade into a period of stagnation. The toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was posing challenges for low-to-middle income Britain's living standards even before...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Green growth and electric vehicles: the role of recycling

The UK needs an electric vehicle (EV) battery recycling industry. This could strengthen the British EV supply chain and support the future development of UK-based gigafactories (large-scale battery factories) and electri...Read more...

External publication

Power plays

The cost of living crisis and the return of strikes over pay and conditions have brought the issue of worker power to the fore in 2022. Although some have pointed to a tight labour market as enabling workers to demand hi...Read more...

Blog

Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy:

Inclusion and wellbeing

The overarching good, according to economists, is utility, by which they mean wellbeing....Read more...

Journal article

Economy Policy: Forthcoming

Dennis Novy discussion of: Startups and employment

New firms, or startups, come into being all the time. Their lives are precarious at the beginning: many firms close down after a short while, and only few firms have a long-run future. Among those that survive, a small m...Read more...

Chapter

Industrial policy and competition

in Globalization, Firms, and Workers

Using a comprehensive dataset of all medium and large enterprises in China between 1998 and 2007, we show that industrial policies allocated to competitive sectors or that foster competition in a sector increase producti...Read more...

Blog

Banque de France:

Ten years on from the business tax reform: how has it affected companies' behaviour?

In 2010, the French corporation tax known as the local economic contribution or CET (contribution economique territoriale) replaced the business tax (TP - taxe professionnelle). This latter tax on production had come und...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Net zero transition to mean significant change for 1.3 million workers

The UK's experience of structural change through deindustrialisation during the 1970s and 1980s drove up unemployment, concentrated among particular parts of the population, and left deep scars on some parts of the count...Read more...

Chapter

The impact of Brexit on UK-EU trade

in The Economics of Brexit: What Have We Learned?

Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Low pay and insecurity in the UK labour market

Minimum wage increases have driven down the incidence of low hourly pay, but there has been much less progress elsewhere for low earners. Low pay is widespread among the self-employed, who do not benefit from the minimum...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Reducing gender gaps in mathematics education

Girls and young women underperform in mathematics relative to their male peers - a loss of talent that may hinder productivity growth. Almudena Sevilla and Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz explain how new developments in gender economi...Read more...

External publication

Net zero jobs

The Government's commitment to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will mean investment, and change, across the economy: from the decarbonisation of buildings and surface transport, to shifts in diet, avi...Read more...

Chapter

The effects of automation on labor demand: a survey of the recent literature

in Robots and AI - a new economic era

Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are powerful forces that will likely have large impacts on the size, direction, and composition of international trade flows. This book discusses how industrial robots, automation,...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Men are from Mars, and women too: a Bayesian meta-analysis of overconfidence experiments

Gender differences in self-confidence could explain women's under-representation in high-income occupations and glass-ceiling effects. We draw lessons from the economic literature via a survey of experts and a Bayesian h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Structural change within versus across firms: evidence from the United States

We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' "auxiliary" establishments, we develop a novel ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

What we learnt about the Covid economy

In spring 2020, many countries imposed radical, urgent actions including lockdowns to protect their citizens' health - but there was also a need to protect people from the worst of the ensuing economic storm. Academics a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Return to work: a dictionary of behavioural biases

Firms are increasingly allowing their employees to decide if they work at home or in the office. But the return to work is fraught with many biases. Julia Bladinieres-Justo, Aleesha Bruce, Anisah Ramli, Nichaphat Surawat...Read more...

External publication

Low pay Britain 2022

This edition of Low Pay Britain is the Resolution Foundation's twelfth annual report taking stock of the state of low pay. Recent editions have focused on the short-term impacts of the Covid-19 crisis on low paid workers...Read more...

Blog

Programme on Innovation and Diffusion Blog:

Risk of Business Failure - POID Tracker - Stalled Covid Recovery

Research shows that small firms are more likely to report they are at risk of failing in recent months, amid growing concerns about challenges such as Brexit controls, the Ukraine crisis and energy price hikes....Read more...

External publication

Growing clean

This report, the 19th report for The Economy 2030 Inquiry, provides a hard-headed assessment of the opportunities presented to UK plc by the move to net zero, and considers how best these can be unlocked. It does this by...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Improving productivity through better management practices

John Van Reenen, Nicholas Bloom, and Raffaella Sadun explain how the World Management Survey provides the evidence needed for designing industrial strategies to tackle low productivity....Read more...

Blog

Cogito:

University Challenge - bridging the local and the global

Anna Valero notes that universities play a special role in driving social and economic progress and shows how they can do even more to benefit their local communities....Read more...

Blog

LSE Research:

State effectiveness and the climate crisis

Combatting the climate crisis is not just an issue of finding money for the right kinds of investment but also ensuring that it is spent effectively, says economist Tim Besley....Read more...

Journal article

World Economy:

The trade impact of the Covid-19 pandemic

Using a gravity-like approach, we study how COVID-19 deaths and lockdown policies affected countries' imports from China during 2020. We find that a country's own COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns significantly reduced its i...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

History and urban economics

This article reviews recent literature using insights from history to answer central questions in urban economics. This area of research has seen rapid growth in the past decade, thanks to new technologies that have made...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Should we insure workers or jobs during recessions?

What is the most efficient way to respond to recessions in the labor market? To this question, policymakers on the two sides of the pond gave diametrically opposed answers during the COVID-19 crisis. In the United States...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Working harder and longer: how managers use their time when working from home

Managers worked longer hours during the pandemic and changed how they used their time, find Thomaz Teodorovicz, Raffaella Sadun, Andrew L. Kun, and Orit Shaer. They suggest how better technology, including AI, could help...Read more...

External publication

Enduring strengths

A decade of stagnant living standards, weak productivity and low investment combined with a coming decade of major change - driven by Covid-19, Brexit and Net Zero - mean that it is crucial for the UK to renew its econom...Read more...

Blog

UK in a Changing Europe:

Levelling up education

Andrew Eyles examines the UK's levelling up white paper, explaining how the plans for education may need to go further to be fully effective....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Political systems affect innovation

Innovation drives economic growth, however data indicates innovative capability differs across economies. Simon Commander, Saul Estrin and Thamashi De Silva suggest democracy is associated with more innovation overall, t...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Unsafe jobs, labour market risk and social protection

This paper proposes a new classification of occupations based on the extent to which they put workers at risk of being infected by aerial-transmitted viruses. We expand on previous work that mainly focused on the identif...Read more...

Blog

VoxTalks Economics:

Motivated science and green innovation (podcast)

Scientists create innovation. Is this because they are paid to do it, or because they care about the outcome? Tim Besley tells Tim Phillips how motivated science drives down the cost of innovation and may accelerate the ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Two years on, how has the pandemic affected businesses in the UK?

Two years on from the start of the pandemic, this article takes stock of how businesses were affected, the extent to which things have recovered and where the effects of Covid-19 are still being felt....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...

External publication

Labour market inequality

Wage and earnings inequality has been on the rise in the 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 of wage and earni...Read more...

CEP Insights

Wellbeing

As societies become richer, they do not become happier. This paradox has led to a growing interest in the science of wellbeing, and how policymakers can evaluate policies in terms of what will improve wellbeing. Economis...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How can we reduce gender gaps in mathematics education?

Underperformance by girls and young women in mathematics relative to their male peers is a loss of talent that may hinder productivity growth. Almudena Sevilla and Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz explore new developments in our unders...Read more...

External publication

Firms and inequalities

There have been some dramatic changes in the business landscape in American firms over the last four decades that have been extensively documented by researchers and are the subject of much public debate (e.g. Van Reenen...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...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

A natural experiment on job insecurity and fertility in France

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. A 1999 rise in the French layoff tax paid by large private firms when they laid off older workers made younger workers less secure; this ins...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The progressive quandary: how to design an immigration policy that balances competing objectives

There is a tension between strong employment rights, a supportive welfare state, equal rights for migrants and locals, and an open, non-selective immigration policy that creates hard decisions for progressive politicians...Read more...

CentrePiece article

UK labour shortages and immigration: looking at the evidence

Can the shortages of workers reported by the UK's food and drink sector be solved by making it easier to hire migrants? How will wages in these sectors change? And is there a conflict between short- and long-term fixes? ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

What lottery wins reveal about the gender gap

The UK has seen a rapid increase in self-employed workers over the last two decades, but only one-third are women. Sarah Flèche and colleagues analyse data on lottery winners to show that improving women's access to capi...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Are we really witnessing a 'great resignation'?

Jonathan Wadsworth questions the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a large rise in the number of people quitting their jobs, either to move to a new job or a new life outside work....Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Firms' digital innovation in the pandemic: how have workers been affected?

Covid-19 has accelerated digitisation in businesses and changes in working practices. Anna Valero, Capucine Riom and Juliana Oliveira-Cunha show how effective training and skills policies will be needed to support conti...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Economists discuss the impact of working from home on productivity, job satisfaction, and women's career progression

The pandemic has led to a big shift to working from home among people in occupations where it is possible for the jobs or some part of them to be done remotely. There has been much debate about the extent to which such f...Read more...

Blog

UK in a Changing Europe:

Expecting Brexit

Swati Dhingra and Thomas Sampson examine how Brexit impacted UK trade and GDP before being implemented in 2021. Finding evidence that the UK's economy was around two to three per cent smaller at the end of 2019 than it w...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...

CEP discussion paper

Optimal minimum wages

We develop a quantitative spatial model with heterogeneous firms and a monopsonistic labour market to derive minimum wages that maximize employment or welfare. Quantifying the model for German micro regions, we find that...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Fair and inclusive markets: why fostering dynamism matters

Philippe Aghion, Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov explain how economic dynamism is crucial for achieving inclusive growth and shared prosperity....Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Tracking business dynamism during the Covid-19 pandemic: new cross-country evidence and visualisation tool

Stefano Agresti, Flavio Calvino, Chiara Criscuolo, Francesco Manaresi and Rudy Verlhac employ a new data visualisation tool to reveal the impact on business dynamism of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020 and in recovery. Findin...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Econometrics: Forthcoming

Union membership density and wages: the role of worker, firm, and job-title heterogeneity

We examine the association between union density and wages in Portugal where just 10 percent of all workers are union members but nine-tenths of them are covered by collective agreements. Using a unique dataset on worker...Read more...

External publication

Changing jobs?

This report is about the nature and speed of change in the UK's labour market, about how past periods of rapid change have happened, and about workers' experiences as they have lived through these changes. It is written ...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Does Rosie like riveting? Male and female occupational choices

Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large, while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps seem to have weakened over time. We explore the possibility that women a...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Autocratic AI dystopias: from science fiction to social science fact

The growth of artificial intelligence technology brings the potential of a 'fourth industrial revolution', but also poses challenges for democratic institutions. This column analyses the mutually reinforcing relationship...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Labour shortages have become widespread - this is how firms are responding

The majority of firms saw business grow between April and October 2021, after the shocks of Covid-19 and Brexit in 2020. But a new analysis by Swati Dhingra and Josh De Lyon into firms' experiences and expectations for t...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Real-time updates on the UK economy: trends, expectations and implications from business survey data

Covid-19 has caused substantial shocks to the UK economy, highlighting a need for real-time data to analyse trends. We use monthly business survey data from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to document recent ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Which speakers will benefit from the rise in remote seminar presentations?

The pandemic has led to a surge in working from home and a fall in business travel. More meetings have taken place remotely. Marcus Biermann (Universite Catholique de Louvain and Centre for Economic Performance, LSE) loo...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

When oligopolies confuse consumers, beware the rise of confusopoly

Confusing consumers can be profitable for companies, in particular in a competitive market where they can hardly increase their prices without losing their consumers. Ambre Nicolle, Christos Genakos, and Tobias Kretschme...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How are climate change policies affecting firms' competitiveness?

Policies to tackle climate change can impose costs on firms, especially those with high emissions of greenhouse gases, potentially reducing their competitiveness in global markets. Such measures can also encourage innova...Read more...

Journal article

Human-Computer Interaction: Forthcoming

How does working from home during COVID-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

Read more...

Blog

Project Syndicate:

The Keys to Inclusive Growth

One of the COVID-19 pandemic's most important economic lessons is that innovation and inclusion need not be mutually exclusive. By pursuing the right policies, Western governments can promote both and thereby help to bri...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Earning less than before Covid-19, the self-employed struggle to make ends meet

Amid the renewed drives for economic growth, self-employed workers still struggle to recover fully from the COVID-19 crisis. Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura write that In September 2021, 28% of workers reported financ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Some of the self-employed are still struggling amid uncertainty about whether they could claim grants

The self-employed have not recovered from the pandemic despite five rounds of government support, find Robert Blackburn (University of Liverpool), Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura (LSE). More than a quarter are in financ...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed - 18 months into the crisis

A year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, growth and economic recovery are the latest watchwords amongst labour market commentators in the UK. In this report we continue to monitor the situation of the self-employed ...Read more...

External publication

Business time

The UK is set for a decade of major change, with private sector firms in the front line. How ready are they for this change? What form should policy towards business take within a new economic strategy for the UK? This r...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Social insurance policies in turbulent times: short-time work versus unemployment insurance

While the US aggressively extended generosity of unemployment insurance in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, Europe heavily subsidised reductions in hours worked and temporary layoffs through short-time work or similar ...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...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Firm innovation in the post-pandemic world

In response to CEP research on firms adopting new technology in respons to Covid-19, Matias Belacin writes about the UK innovation strategy and the long-term plans to further boost innovation-led growth....Read more...

Journal article

Nature Energy:

Global trends in the invention and diffusion of climate change mitigation technologies

Increasing the development and diffusion of climate change mitigation technologies on a global scale is critical to reaching net-zero emissions. We have analysed over a quarter of a million high-value inventions in all m...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Economics:

Power outages and firm performance: A hydro-IV approach for a single electricity grid

We estimate the impact of power outages on firm performance using a hydro-instrumental variable strategy which integrates a river flow with a hydropower generation model and an electricity-grid-based distance interpolati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do carbon offsets offset carbon?

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies, and use it to provide systematic evidence on the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism - the world's largest carbon off...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

The Net Zero Strategy provides a foundation which now needs to be cemented in investment, tax, and regulatory decisions

The UK government has delivered on its promise to publish a strategy for driving the country's economy towards net zero emissions by 2050. Esin Serin and Anna Valero write that the economy-wide Net Zero Strategy provides...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Minimum wages and the China syndrome: causal evidence from US local labor markets

Exposure to Chinese import competition led to significant manufacturing job losses in the United States. Local labor markets, however, differ significantly in how they fared with respect to manufacturing employment. An i...Read more...

CEP report

Are 'green' jobs good jobs?

The transition to net-zero will have far-reaching but unequal effects, as 'dirty' jobs disappear while new jobs aligned with or supportive of the net-zero objective - which we refer to as 'green' - are created. As govern...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pandemic shock and economic divergence: political economy before and after the black death

We document how the Black Death activated politics and led to economic divergence within Europe. Before the pandemic, economic development was similar in Eastern and Western German cities despite greater political fragme...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Nobel prize in economics recognises evidence-based impact evaluation

following the announcement of the 2021 Nobel prize in economics being awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their contributions to an evidence-based research, Gonzalo Nunez-Chaim explains the continu...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Poland's economy in the pandemic

The Polish economy has largely managed to avoid the pandemic-induced troubles experienced in Western Europe. But as Pawel Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos argue, contrary to government claims of able stewardship, what has got ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Green growth

Many countries have plans for a 'green recovery' from the pandemic. Anna Valero reviews 30 years of CEP research into how environmental and industrial policies can be combined to achieve economic growth that is strong, s...Read more...

Blog

Buzzsprout:

Emissions: Impossible? What does a Net Zero economy really look like?

Dr Anna Valero - ESRC innovation fellow at London School of Economics - is a guest on 'Emissions: Impossible?' a podcast showcasing some of the most ground-breaking research and innovation in climate change, to reveal wh...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Return of the guest worker: guest or servant?

Demands for temporary visas are increasing in the UK, but few are discussing the details of how such short-term visas are going to work. Alan Manning writes a nuanced account of the trade-offs involved. The worse the con...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How does climate change shape inequality, poverty and economic opportunity?

Climate change and economic inequality are often considered independently of one another. Jonathan Colmer explains how these factors are inextricably linked, and neither can be addressed without engaging with the other....Read more...

External publication

The carbon crunch

This report is the launch paper for the net zero strand of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, a joint project between the Resolution Foundation and the London School of Economics. It outlines how net zero can be placed at the cen...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How do internal communication flows change when a new CEO is appointed?

CEO turnovers are significant organisational events that typically mark a discontinuity in firm strategy and operations. These likely changes are visible in internal communication flows. Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Pr...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Will vaccine mandates boost the economy? Economists think so

A survey explored US economists' views on President Biden's vaccine mandates. Will the mandates promote a faster and stronger economic recovery? Romesh Vaitilingam writes that the 42 economists who took part in the surve...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How has Covid-19 affected part-time jobs?

People in full-time employment have been far more protected from job loss than part-time workers over the course of the pandemic. Jonathan Wadsworth writes how younger workers have lost out in both part-time and full-tim...Read more...

CEP report

Seizing sustainable growth opportunities from carbon capture, usage and storage in the UK

Seizing opportunities from the CCUS value chain can be part of an economy-wide, net-zero-aligned growth path in the UK. The UK has responded to the climate emergency facing the world with an economy-wide target to reach...Read more...

CEP Insights

Green Growth

Many countries have plans for a "green recovery" from the pandemic, in which the invention and diffusion of "clean" technologies and practices are central. How can environmental and broader industrial policies be combine...Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics:

Evidence from East Germany: how young people's education plans are shaped by their environment

The decision to go to university can have a major impact on an individual's financial future and quality of life. Yet we know relatively little about how these decisions are made and adapted within different contexts. Dr...Read more...

Journal article

National Tax Journal:

How did safety-net reform affect early adulthood among adolescents from low-income families?

In the 1990s, the US safety net was substantially reformed. We ask how those reforms collectively affected early-career outcomes among youths who were teens when the reforms took effect. We consider employment, safety-ne...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Why are pollution damages lower in developed countries? Insights from high-Income, high-particulate matter Hong Kong

Conventional wisdom suggests that marginal damages from particulate matter pollution are high in less-developed countries because they are highly polluted. Using administrative data on the universe of births and deaths, ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Labour market reallocation in the wake of Covid-19

As economies bounce back from Covid-19, our economists question whether the recovery will re-employ all of the workers made redundant during the downturn, and whether they will go back to similar jobs....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: A longitudinal study of lottery wins

Would improving women's access to capital reduce the gender entrepreneurial gap? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we find that an increase ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Trade and innovation

International trade is a key determinant of firm profitability and survival, so it is natural to expect it to influence both incentives to innovate and the rate of creative destruction. This column highlights four key me...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Let me work from home, or I will find another job

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven Davis examine survey data from American employees currently working from home, and find 40% say they would seek another job if employers require a full return to business premis...Read more...

Submission to a parliamentary inquiry and government consultation

Jobs, growth, and productivity after coronavirus

The Committee will examine how the Government can reduce and mitigate economic scarring and job losses after the pandemic, how much difference the Government can make to economic growth, and what has caused the UK's prod...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Are bigger banks better? Firm-level evidence from Germany

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in postwar Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Locked-in syndrome: why this must all end on 19 July

Zero COVID is unachievable, write Paul Dolan (LSE) and Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford). Continuing to impose restrictions inflicts disproportionate harm on the young, small businesses and creative industries....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Marriage as insurance: job protection and job insecurity in France

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it. We here consider marriage as a way of insuring against labour-market risk. The 199...Read more...

Journal article

iScience:

Financial viability of electric vehicle lithium-ion battery recycling

Economically viable electric vehicle lithium-ion battery recycling is increasingly needed; however routes to profitability are still unclear. We present a comprehensive, holistic techno-economic model as a framework to d...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Start-ups in the time of Covid-19: facing the challenges, seizing the opportunities

Flavio Calvino, Chiara Criscuolo and Rudy Verlhac explore ways for policymakers to incentivise businesses and speed up economic recovery against Covid-19's effect on start-ups and new firms....Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

School's in: are more of the young staying in education during the downturn?

With Covid-19's effect on the availability of part-time and weekend jobs, more young people are staying on at school. Jonathan Wadsworth examines the links between study and work in the youth labour market....Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Reflections on struggling high streets

Henry Overman reflects on the findings from the What Works Centre's Recovery Workshop focusing on the British high street, looking at how an economic recovery from the pandemic focused on policy may best help our high st...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and innovation

Two central insights from the Schumpeterian approach to innovation and growth are that the pace of innovation is endogenously determined by the expectation of future profits and that growth is inherently a process of cre...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Returning to the office will be hard

The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a collective shift to working from home. This column argues that though the shift was surprisingly easy, returning to the office will be hard. New evidence from a survey of 2,500 employees ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Beyond income inequality: non-monetary rewards to work

Discussion of income inequality focuses primarily on wages with limited consideration of the non-monetary rewards to work, not least the satisfaction that employees experience in doing their jobs. Andrew Clark, Maria Cot...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The motherhood penalty for working women in Spain

Spain has seen a huge influx of women into the workplace in recent decades, but their experiences of work remain very different from those of men. As Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela explain, there is scope for...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Covid-19 and self-employment

The pandemic has had particularly damaging economic effects on self-employed people in the UK. CEP has now run three surveys to capture the experience of these workers during the crisis. Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The impact of regulation on innovation

It is widely feared that private sector innovation is constrained by 'red tape'. Philippe Aghion and colleagues test that view on data from France, where firms of more than 50 employees face far heavier regulatory obliga...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Going for growth that's sustainable and equitable

In the second anniversary lecture marking 30 years since CEP began, former director John Van Reenen focused on productivity, an issue that has been at the heart of the Centre's work for three decades. He sets out how tec...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Ethnic minorities and the UK labour market

Contrary to the impression given by the Sewell Report, there has been little change in disparities in pay, employment and unemployment among different ethnic groups in the UK over the past 25 years. Indeed, as analysis o...Read more...

Blog

Knowledge:

Rethinking capitalism: the power of creative destruction

Philippe Aghion and Isabelle Laporte explain how, with the proper safeguards, creative destruction - the process by which the new replaces the old - remains the way to greater economic growth and prosperity....Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The 2020 trade impact of the Covid-19 pandemic

Worldwide merchandise trade flows decreased significantly in 2020, as Covid-19 disrupted economic activity across the globe. This column analyses how various pandemic-related factors shaped international trade flows. Spe...Read more...

Blog

LSE Latin American and Caribbean:

The beautiful gain: what can Brazilian football tell us about the effect of non-compete clauses on wages?

With the 1998 Pele Law eliminating transfer fees for players whose contracts had expired, Brazilian football provides an ideal setting to test the effect of non-compete agreements on wages. This analysis reveals that old...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Retraining: which are the best policies for getting people back to work?

Many people are expected to lose their jobs in the aftermath of the pandemic. Retraining will be one important way to get them back into work. Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally, Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela show there is a good...Read more...

External publication

Pancakes to pyramids: city form to promote sustainable growth (English)

Towns and cities are economic and social microcosms in which large numbers of people and firms interact. These interactions largely shape how a city looks, how it functions, and how it grows. But how exactly does this ma...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

Vox EU:

The distinctive character of policy-driven stock market jumps

When the stock market moves in a big way, journalists try to explain why. This column uses next-day newspaper accounts to characterise the drivers of more than 6,000 big daily moves ('jumps') across 16 national stock mar...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

The 2020s will be a crunch decade that will determine the UK's trajectory into the mid-21st century

As vaccines roll out and restrictions are lifted, public debate is turning to the economic recovery from Covid-19 and the deepest annual downturn for 300 years that came in its wake. But viewing the years ahead simply as...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Why global uncertainty is declining

The latest update of the World Uncertainty Index indicates that global uncertainty has fallen back to its long-run average after reaching a historical high in 2020. This column describes how this is driven by a significa...Read more...

External publication

The UK's decisive decade: the launch report for The Economy 2030 Inquiry

This report marks the launch of The Economy 2030 Inquiry, a landmark collaboration between the Resolution Foundation and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, funded by the Nuffield Found...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What is the future of commuting to work?

Around half the UK labour force is currently working from home. Paul Mizen, Nick Bloom, Shivani Taneja analyse survey data suggesting that spending two to three days a week at home is the most common expected working pat...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

OPENing up military innovation: The causal effects of 'bottom up' reforms to US defence research

In recent decades, US defence R&D seems to have lost its lustre. To combat the declining innovation, in 2018 the US Air Force reformed its contracting procedures to allow applicants more freedom to suggest projects with ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Why the UK-India Young Professionals Scheme might end up benefitting a handful of large companies

The announcement of a new visa for young, professional Indians to work in the UK could prove popular - but an eye needs to be kept on how it ends up being used in practice, writes Alan Manning....Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Update: Which firms and industries have been most affected by Covid-19?

Businesses across the UK have been negatively affected by the pandemic, but the damage has not been equal. Certain sectors and certain firms within them have suffered more than others - and many have faced highly uncerta...Read more...

Blog

LSE Research for the World:

Government urban regeneration initiative failed to improve Britain's most deprived areas

In 1994, John Major's Conservative government launched an initiative to improve a range of societal issues through regeneration. The Single Regeneration Budget ran for nearly a decade, but failed to create opportunities ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Education and economic growth

This paper summarises the literature that has linked education and economic growth. It begins with an overview of the key concepts in neoclassical and endogenous growth models, and discussion on how these have been teste...Read more...

Blog

Notes from Poland:

Why is Poland's economy emerging so strongly from the pandemic? A comparison with the UK

Poland is no longer Europe's "green island" of growth, as it was during the 2008 financial crisis when it was the only country not to fall into recession. Yet its economy has managed to avoid the pandemic-induced trouble...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Lockdowns widen the gender gap in mental health

Women, the young, and the less educated have borne the brunt of the economic damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns in terms of job and earnings losses. As this column reports, women have also suffered far ...Read more...

Blog

POID Blog:

Risk of Business Failure: POID Tracker

Peter Lambert and John Van Reenen track how UK businesses view their risks of bankruptcy over the next three months, finding extensions to COVID support schemes have helped avert a wave of bankruptcies, but risks remain....Read more...

Book

The Power of Creative Destruction
Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations

Crisis seems to follow crisis. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant, the environment is suffering, and the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed every crack in the system. We hear more and more calls for radical change, even...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What is the future of working from home?

Working from home has become more common during the pandemic, but only in certain sectors. Jonathan Haskel writes about the likelihood that the practice will be permanently adopted depends on perceptions of workforce pro...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Contrary to the impression given by the Sewell Report, things for ethnic minorities in the UK labour market are not getting better

Using estimates from the Labour Force Survey, Alan Manning and Rebecca Rose fill in some of the gaps of the government's Sewell Report on race and ethnic disparities. Comparing disparities in pay, employment, and unemplo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: a longitudinal study of lottery wins

Can capital constraints explain why there are more male than female entrepreneurs in most societies? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we fi...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: The UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000–2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Parents, Schools and Human Capital Differences Across Countries

This paper studies the contribution of parental influence in accounting for cross-country gaps in human capital achievements. We argue that the cross-country variation in unobserved parental characteristics is at least a...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Aiming for zero Covid-19 to ensure economic growth

With the pandemic continuing now for over a year, it has become clear that there is no trade-off between health and wealth. Successful pandemic management has relied on aiming for and protecting Covid-free green zones. T...Read more...

Journal article

Business History:

Changes in Victorian entrepreneurship in England and Wales 1851-1911: Methodology and business population estimates

The full population of England and Wales employers and own-account business proprietors is estimated using population censuses 1851–1911. The main contribution of the article is a method of mixed single imputation to ove...Read more...

Journal article

Environmental Research Letters:

Induced innovation in energy technologies and systems: A review of evidence and potential implications for CO2 mitigation

We conduct a systematic and interdisciplinary review of empirical literature assessing evidence on induced innovation in energy and related technologies. We explore links between demand-drivers (both market-wide and targ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Barriers to net-zero: How firms can make or break the green transition

Many countries are striving for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, requiring massive investments over the next decades. But many companies, especially smaller ones, will not be able or willing to invest in cleaner techno...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Does benchmarking help firms grow?

Gonzalo Nunez-Chaim explores the evidence on the impact of benchmarking - measuring and comparing performance across and within firms. Finding that, for such a popular approach, it's surprising how little we know about t...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:

Work and children: is the motherhood penalty in Spain too high for working women?

Spain has seen a huge influx of women into the workplace, but men and women's experiences of work remain very different. Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela say there is scope for new family-friendly policies to h...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Covid-19 and self-employment ten months into the crisis

Almost a year into the crisis, the latest lockdown has hit the self-employed hard in the UK. In January 2021, 57% of surveyed self-employed workers were earning less than £1,000 per month, up from 31% in January 2020 an...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed - ten months into the crisis

Almost a year into the Covid-19 crisis, it has become widely acknowledged that UK self-employment has been particularly hard hit. Here we continue our series investigating the experience of self-employed workers througho...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The local economic impacts of regeneration projects: Evidence from UK's single regeneration budget

Many governments aim to improve the labour market outcomes of people living in deprived areas through "place-making" initiatives. Economists are often sceptical about the effectiveness of such policies, but empirical evi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The impact of public employment: Evidence from Bonn

This paper evaluates the impact of changes in public employment on private sector activity using the creation of the new West German government in Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variati...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

LSE Festival 2021 | Many of us will return to offices - but not for the whole week

As the pandemic drags on, employers have got better at organising their staff to work from home, says Daniela Scur (Cornell University and LSE). Not all will return to the office, and many will never go back to the five-...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Lockdown and the social life of big cities

The effects of Covid-19 on the social lives of city dwellers - being able to go to the pub, restaurants and theatre - may be more relevant for the future of cities than its impact on work. That's the implication of a tho...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Innovation policy to restore American prosperity

The new US administration has the opportunity to reset an economic model that has failed to deliver prosperity for millions of Americans for decades. John Van Reenen calls for a Grand Innovation Challenge Fund – federal ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Is Tokyo 2020 worth it?

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games have been rescheduled to take place in July and August this year. Christian Krekel uses tools from the new science of wellbeing to assess whether the event should still go ahead and how likel...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Lockdown, recession and crime

What has happened to criminal activity in England and Wales during the pandemic? Tom Kirchmaier and Carmen VillaLlera explore the effects of lockdown and job loss on the kinds of crimes being committed – and the ability ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19 Blog:

We can tackle the climate emergency and grow the economy at the same time

The idea that economic growth is incompatible with tackling the climate emergency is wrong, says John Van Reenen (LSE). He sets out how technological innovation and better management can bring about sustainable growth....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...

Blog

LSE US Centre:

Trade protection along supply chains: how antidumping measures against China hurt downstream industries

Production processes are often no longer confined to a single country; supply chains can be fragmented across great distances. By contrast, tariffs are often used by individual countries to protect certain industries. In...Read more...

Blog

VoxEu:

After Brexit: views of leading economists on future prospects for the UK and EU economies

The UK's exit from the EU was finally completed on 1 January 2021. The IGM Forum at Chicago Booth invited its panels of leading European and US economists to express their views on the likely long-term effects of Brexit ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Trade protection along supply chains: the negative effects of tariffs on downstream sectors

In a world in which production processes are fragmented across countries, the effects of tariffs propagate along supply chains, with firms in downstream industries suffering from protection upstream. This column studies...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Disunited Kingdom? Brexit, trade and Scottish independence

The Scottish National Party is calling for a second referendum on independence from the UK. This column examines the likely effect of changes in trade costs resulting from independence and Brexit on the Scottish economy,...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

Covid-19 and the youth labour market. The kids are (probably) alright

Jonathan Wadsworth considers youth unemployment in light of the UK's furlough scheme, the end of lockdowns and economic downturn....Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Regulation chills minor (but not radical) technological innovations

While there is suggestive evidence that regulations may have a stifling effect on innovation, there is as yet no rigorous economic framework to quantify the magnitude of such regulatory effects on innovation and the aggr...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

A major wave of UK business closures by April 2021? The scale of the problem and what can be done

This report presents an analysis of the financial health of UK businesses, which shows that immediate action is needed to prevent a wave of corporate failure in early April. We cannot delay action. Now is also the moment...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

New incentives for businesses to train their employees are needed for economic recovery from Covid-19

The need to retrain or upskill the workforce has become ever more urgent due to sharp changes in skills demand induced by the pandemic, write Jiaqi Li, Guglielmo Ventura and Anna Valero....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: the UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000-2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors...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...

CEP discussion paper

Trade protection along supply chains

During the last decades, the United States has applied increasingly high trade protection against China. We combine detailed information on US antidumping (AD) duties— the most widely used trade barrier — with US input-o...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Turbulence, Firm Decentralization, and Growth in Bad Times

What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information increases (the “localist” view). On t...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Adjustment Costs and Factor Demand: New Evidence from Firms’ Real Estate

We study corporate real estate frictions and their effect on firm dynamics and labour demand. We build and simulate a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that predicts the response of firms to a productivi...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Trapped Factors and China’s Impact on Global Growth

After a recent increase in Chinese import competition, European firms increased innovation. We present and rationalise these patterns using ‘trapped factors’ at the micro level within a stylised equilibrium model of prod...Read more...

External publication

IZA Research Report No. 105:

IZA Covid-19 crisis response monitoring: United Kingdom

On the 23rd of March, the United Kingdom locked down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, the UK economy suffered the biggest contraction of economic activity in 41 years, experiencing a 21.5% year-on-year...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

What happened when parents lost their jobs during lockdown?

Many parents had to cope with losing their jobs or part of their income at the same time as they were forced to home school. How did this affect their children's learning and their mental health? Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isp...Read more...

Journal article

World Trade Evolution: Growth, Productivity and Employment:

Firm-to-firm connections in Colombian imports

Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and changing crime trends in England and Wales

We document changing crime trends in England and Wales in the context of the current global pandemic. During the first lockdown that span from mid-March to mid-May 2020 there was a decrease in all crime categories except...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Lockdown shows us it is not work that attracts us to big cities - but the social life

Covid-19's effect on the social lives of city dwellers - being able to meet at the pub, restaurants or theatre - may be more relevant for the future of cities than its impact on work, write Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are bigger banks better? Firm-level evidence from Germany

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in post-war Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pandemics, global supply chains and local labor demand: evidence from 100 million posted jobs in China

This paper studies how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected labor demand, using over 100 million posted jobs on one of the largest online platforms in China. Our data reveal that the number of newly posted jobs within the ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

How lockdowns have reversed traditional gender roles in some UK households and further entrenched them in others

Claudia Hupkau and Barbara Petrongolo discuss what the likely implications of a second lockdown are for gender equality at work and in the home....Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed: six months into the crisis

Six months after Covid-19 first hit, it is clear that it is the greatest economic crisis of the modern age. The economy has contracted far more rapidly than in previous crises, with GDP dropping by a record 19.5 per cent...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

Who's being made redundant during Covid? Who is staying at work. And is it any different from usual?

Following his previous blog post looking at trends in redundancies over the COVID period relative to previous downturns, Jonathan Wadsworth looks to understand who is being laid off and whether this is any different from...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

Redundancies and the labour market under Covid. Has furlough helped? And other related things you may have missed

Redundancies are often seen as commensurate with unemployment - but not always. In this blog post, Jonathan Wadsworth analyses the links between the UK's furlough scheme and redundancies....Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Monopsony in labour markets: what it is, why it matters

Many firms are able to exploit the fact that it is hard for workers to move from one employer to another, keeping wages lower than they would be in a competitive market. As Alan Manning explains, labour markets are becom...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... City of dreams no more: Covid-19 in urban India

The pandemic has decimated livelihoods in urban India and created a new underclass of workers who are being pushed into poverty. A CEP report by Shania Bhalotia, Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli calls for a national w...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The impact of public employment: evidence from West Germany's post-war capital Bonn

Raising the level of public employment is a frequently used policy instrument to support economically lagging regions. This column evaluates the impact of changes in public employment on private sector activity using the...Read more...

Blog

CVER Blog:

Stark contrast between pre- and post-16 provision in UTCs

At a time when Prime Minister Boris Johnson has put the government’s skills policy agenda in the spotlight, Guglielmo Ventura presents findings from his research seeking to understand whether UTCs were successful at br...Read more...

Blog

LSE American Politics and Policy Blog:

Enslavers dominated Southern politics long after the Civil War ended

Before the Civil War, the politics and economy of the Southern US were dominated by those who practiced immoral - but at the time legally permissible - forced enslavement. In new research, Luna Bellani, Anselm Hager, and...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Jobs for a strong and sustainable recovery from Covid-19

The UK’s future economic, social and environmental prosperity will be shaped by how it deals with, and recovers from, the impact of Covid-19. This paper sets out coordinated net-zero-aligned investments which the UK can ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

The impact of terrorism on individual well-being: Evidence from the boston marathon bombing

A growing literature has concluded that terrorism affects the economy, yet less is known about its impact on individual welfare. This article estimates the impact of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing on well-being, exploi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements: a cross-country perspective on the changing composition of jobs

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

A no-deal Brexit may still be more costly than Covid-19

Conventional wisdom holds that the impact of COVID-19 on the UK economy dwarfs the potential consequences of Brexit. This has led some Brexiteers to argue there is nothing to fear about a no-deal Brexit. Yet data show th...Read more...

Journal article

SERIEs:

Job loss at home: children's school performance during the Great Recession

This paper studies the intergenerational impact of parental job loss on school performance during the Great Recession in Spain. Collecting data through parental surveys in a school in the province of Barcelona, I obtain ...Read more...

Submission to a parliamentary inquiry and government consultation

Employment and Covid-19

The Committee will examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market and consider what urgent measures should be taken to protect and create jobs. It will also examine how the labour market may change as ...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

City of dreams no more: the impact of Covid-19 on urban workers in India

Many developing economies have large informal sectors and growing urban youth populations, who lack basic social protections at work. The CEP surveyed 8,500 workers aged 18 to 40 in urban India to understand their experi...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why we need to do something about the monopsony power of employers

Monopsony decreases worker mobility, keeping wages lower than they would be in a competitive market, writes Alan Manning...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

What can previous recessions tell us about the Covid-19 downturn?

The labour market effects of the Covid-19 crisis measured as of June 2020 are compared with the three most recent UK recessions: the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the downturn induced by the global financial crisis i...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

Devolving skills: the case of the apprenticeship grant for employers

One rationale for devolution is that local decision makers may be well placed to adapt national policies to the local context. We test whether such adaptation helps meet programme objectives in the case of the Apprentice...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International friends and enemies

We develop sufficient statistics of countries’ bilateral income and welfare exposure to foreign productivity shocks that are exact for small shocks in the class of models with a constant trade elasticity. For large shock...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Covid-19 and the future of self-employment

Jack Blundell reports how self-employed workers have been particularly hard hit by the crisis....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dream jobs

Understanding why certain jobs are ‘better’ than others and what implications they have for a worker’s career is clearly an important but still relatively unexplored question. We provide both a theoretical framework and ...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

The effects of supporting local business: evidence from the UK

This paper assesses the effects of a significant place-based intervention that targeted local businesses in deprived areas in the UK. To gain identification, we use data at a fine spatial scale and a regression discontin...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Which firms and industries have been most affected by Covid-19?

Almost all UK businesses have been badly affected by the spread of Covid-19, but some industries have been hit harder than others. Financial market data and surveys of firms themselves provide insights into the scale of ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19 blog:

How a job guarantee scheme can avoid the slide into long-term unemployment

Even if COVID-19 infection rates dwindle, it is now clear that the economy is unlikely to bounce back quickly. This raises the spectre of long-term unemployment. Richard Layard (LSE) explains how the government could dra...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Work, care and gender during the Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 crisis has especially hit service sectors with frequent social interactions, in which women are over-represented. At the same time, if not directly subject to the lock-down, women are more likely to hold job...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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The Covid-19 recession is creating a crisis of inequality

Earnings may be affected differently by age, gender, and firm size, with large cuts for the young in small firms, write Brian Bell, Nick Bloom, Jack Blundell, and Luigi Pistaferri...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A natural experiment on job insecurity and fertility in France

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. We here argue that it reduces fertility amongst the employed. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by large private firms when th...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The UK's self-employed workers: who they are and what they need

One in seven people in the UK workforce is now in self-employment – but this is a very diverse community. Jack Blundell is developing a typology of self-employed workers, which can then be used to assess differences in h...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Public goods institutions, human capital, and growth: Evidence from german history

What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study public goods provision established through new laws in German cities during the 1500s. Cities that adopted the laws subsequently ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The contribution of immigration to local labor market adjustment

The US suffers from persistent local disparities in employment rates, which should in principle be eliminated by population mobility. Can immigration accelerate this process? Remarkably, on average since 1960, new immigr...Read more...

CEP report

Seizing sustainable growth opportunities from zero emission passenger vehicles in the UK

This is a Special report for the LSE Growth Commission, produced with the Centre for Economic Performance, that provides a set of actionable recommendations to the UK government to drive sustainable growth in the context...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Clusters in UK self-employment

UK Self-employment has soared in recent years. With existing labour market policy designed to cater for conventional employee relationships, policymakers in this field are increasingly seeking to better understand these ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The aggregate consequences of default risk: evidence from firm-level data

This paper studies the implications of perceived default risk for aggregate output and productivity. Using a model of credit contracts with moral hazard, we show that a firm’s probability of default is a sufficient stati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias

Using decadal census data since 1960, I cannot reject the hypothesis that new immigrants crowd out existing residents from US commuting zones and states one-for-one. My estimate accounts explicitly for dynamic local adju...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The elusive employment effect of the minimum wage

Vacant, previously-developed land in cities can generate negative externalities on surrounding areas, and is often the target of policies to promote re-development. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Child sleep and mother labour market outcomes

We show that sleep deprivation exerts strong negative effects on mothers’ labour market performance. To isolate variations in maternal sleep, we exploit unique variations in child sleep disruption using a UK panel datase...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Intergenerational effects of employment protection reforms

Job insecurity has worsened in most OECD countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Labour Force Survey data, I estimate the link between parental job insecurity (as measured by the contract type held by pa...Read more...

CVER Briefing Note

Inequality in education and labour market participation of young people across English localities:An exploration based on Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data

Currently, 792,000 16-24-year olds in the UK – 11.5% of the age group – are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), but not much is known about how this differs by local area. In this Briefing Note, we provide c...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The labour market

The UK labour market, at first glance, seems to be playing at Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Employment (in terms of both levels and rates) is at record highs, yet wage growth has been extraordinarily weak. One view is that thes...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Journal:

Can Helping the Sick Hurt the Able? Incentives, Information and Disruption in a Welfare Reform

The UK Jobcentre Plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients (relative to unemployment insurance recipients) into jobs. In the long run, the policy raised exits off disability bene...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The gig economy and workers' preferences for steady jobs

Is the rise of gig work, freelancing, zero hours contracts and self-employment a result of people wanting such work or because they have no other choice? Nikhil Datta finds that while workers in the gig economy may like ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Macroeconomics:

Productivity growth, capital reallocation and the financial crisis: Evidence from Europe and the US

How has capital reallocation affected productivity growth since the financial crisis? For example, have low interest rates disrupted the reallocation process? This paper calculates the effect on productivity growth of ca...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Residential mobility in the UK: how distance and local economic conditions drive residential choices

Monica Langella and Alan Manning find that high unemployment in an area induces people to move away, and has an even stronger effect on the attractiveness of that area to potential movers. They also find that younger and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation union: costs and benefits of innovation policy coordination

We build a two-region endogenous growth model to analyse the gains from innovation policy cooperation in an economic union. The model is calibrated to two blocks of the EU: the old and new members. R&D subsidy coordinati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A toolkit of policies to promote innovation

Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to under-provide innovation due to the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the US and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summari...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Willing to pay for security: a discrete choice experiment to analyse labour supply preferences

This paper investigates the extent to which labour supply preferences are responsible for the marked rise in atypical work arrangements in the UK and US. By employing vignettes in a discrete job choice experiment in a re...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Workers' falling share of firms' profits

To what extent do UK companies share their profits with employees? Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin find that rent-sharing is on a much smaller scale today than during the 1980s and 1990s – and that the decl...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Zero Hours Contracts and Labour Market Policy

The evolving nature of atypical work arrangements is studied. A particular focus is placed on one such form of work relation: zero hour contracts (ZHCs). The paper uses existing secondary data and new survey data collect...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) versus environment (“nurture”). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million invento...Read more...

CEP Brexit analysis

Economic performance since the EU referendum

The impact of the Brexit vote can now begin to be evaluated with greater accuracy than previous forecasts, thanks to the emergence of new data. In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union (EU...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Devolving Skills: The case of the Apprenticeship Grant for Employers

One rationale for devolution is that local decision makers may be well placed to adapt national skills’ policies to the local context. We test whether such adaptation helps meet programme objectives in the case of the A...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Sustainable growth in the UK

Anna Valero and colleagues urge the UK government to put action on climate change and sustainability at the heart of its growth strategy....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Trade and growth in the Iron Age

Stephan Maurer and colleagues investigate the growth effects of one of the first trade expansions in history: the crossing of the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

When innovation policy trumped protectionism: the Reagan years

Giammario Impullitti and colleagues show that it was the Reagan administration's innovation policy - not a retreat from globalisation - that promoted US growth....Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

The Economic Impact of Universities: Evidence from Across the Globe

We develop a new dataset using UNESCO source materials on the location of nearly 15,000 universities in about 1,500 regions across 78 countries, some dating back to the 11th Century. We estimate fixed effects models at t...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Some causal effects of an industrial policy

We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a program to support jobs through investment subsidies. European rules determine whether an area is eligible for subsidies, and we construct instrumental v...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Monetary policy, product market competition and growth

In this paper we argue that monetary easing fosters growth more in more credit-constrained environments, and the more so the higher the degree of product market competition. Indeed when competition is low, large rents al...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation and trade policy in a globalized world

How do import tariffs and R&D subsidies help domestic firms compete globally? How do these policies affect aggregate growth and economic welfare? To answer these questions we build a dynamic general equilibrium growth mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Subsidizing labor hoarding in recessions: the employment and welfare effects of short time work

The Great Recession has seen a revival of interest in policies encouraging labor hoarding by firms. Short time work (STW) policies, which consist in offering subsidies for hours reductions to workers in firms experiencin...Read more...

CEP industrial strategy paper

Sustainable growth in the UK: seizing opportunities from technological change and the transition to a low-carbon economy

An overarching strategy for sustainable growth is required to address the dual challenges of restoring productivity growth and managing a transition to a low-carbon economy – priorities in both the UK and other G20 count...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rent sharing and inclusive growth

The long-run evolution of rent sharing is empirically studied. Based upon a comprehensive and harmonized panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over thirty five years, the paper reports evidence of a sign...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The contribution of foreign migration to local labor market adjustment

The US suffers from large regional disparities in employment rates which have persisted for many decades. It has been argued that foreign migration offers a remedy: it “greases the wheels” of the labor market by accelera...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Universities and industrial strategy in the UK

The UK’s higher education sector is a source of national strength with the potential to contribute to all areas of the government’s industrial strategy. Anna Valero and colleagues review the evidence on how the positive ...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

The regional effects of Germany's national minimum wage

We show that the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015 led to spatial wage convergence, in particular in the left tail of the distribution, without reducing relative employment in low-wage regions within the first t...Read more...

CEP industrial strategy paper

Universities and industrial strategy in the UK: review of evidence and implications for policy

As producers of human capital, innovation and as large institutions in their own right, UK universities can make important contributions across the five foundations that underpin the government�s Industrial Strategy: p...Read more...

CEP industrial strategy paper

Unlocking SME productivity: review of recent evidence and implications for the UK’s industrial strategy

Improving productivity is one of the main goals of the government's Industrial Strategy. Since the UK is a nation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the question arises whether SMEs have a role to play in indu...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...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

The persistence of local joblessness

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. Thes...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Care homes: effects of the National Living Wage

The National Living Wage, which was introduced in 2016, has substantially raised wages at the bottom of the hourly wage distribution in care homes in England, a sector that employs a large number of low-paid workers. Acc...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The price of Brexit

Writing in the summer 2018 issue of CentrePiece magazine, Thomas Sampson notes that the full economic consequences of the UK’s leave vote will not be realised for many years. But two years after the referendum, we can al...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Have R&D spillovers changed?

This paper revisits the results of Bloom, Schankerman, and Van Reenen (2013) examining the impact of R&D on the performance of US firms, especially through spillovers. We extend their analysis to include an additional 15...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm-to-firm connections in Colombian imports

The vast majority of world trade flows is between firms. Only recently has research in international trade started to emphasize the importance of the connections between exporters and importers both in aggregate trade fl...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...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:

Growth volatility and size: A firm-level study

This paper provides a systematic cross-country investigation of the relation between a firm's growth volatility and its size. For the first time the analysis is carried out using comparable and representative sets of dat...Read more...

Journal article

Social science & medicine:

Ownership and hospital behaviour: Employment and local unemployment

In this paper, we address two issues: i) how hospital employment changes with local unemployment, according to the type of hospital ownership, and ii) whether this relationship changed after the implementation of a pro-c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changing the structure of minimum wages: firm adjustment and wage spillovers

This paper analyses the economic impact of a significant change to the structure of a minimum wage setting policy. The context is the United Kingdom where government mandated an unexpected change in the structure of mini...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

One or Many Cohesion Policies of the European Union? On the Diverging Impacts of Cohesion Policy across Member States

Do regions in all Member States (MSs) of the European Union (EU) benefit from Cohesion Policy? Are regional impacts persistently diversified across countries? In order to answer these questions this paper explores how th...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Impact of Public Employment: Evidence from Bonn

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous varia...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Big plant closures and local employment

This paper estimates the impact of large plant closures on the local employment in the affected industry. Specifically, we examine the closure of 45 large manufacturing plants in Spain which relocated abroad between 2001...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

Minimum wages and firm value

How does the value of a firm change in response to a minimum wage hike? The evidence we have to date is not well-suited to answer this question, principally because events that have been studied are not completely unknow...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Lost Einsteins: How exposure to innovation influences who becomes an inventor

Article by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen: Relatively little is known about the factors that induce people to become inventors. Using data on the lives of over one million inv...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The economic consequences of family policies: lessons from a century of legislation in high-income countries

By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fer...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tax simplicity and heterogeneous learning

We study the effects of fiscal incentives for self-employment using new French tax data from 1994 to 2012. France serves as a good quasi-laboratory: It has three fiscal regimes - or modes of taxation - for the self-emplo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Missing growth from creative destruction

Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products based on surviving products, which may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. Using U.S. Census data, we apply two ways of assessi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happiness at work

Work-life balance is a particularly strong predictor of people’s happiness. High degrees of job satisfaction can hide low levels of engagement at work. Happiness helps to shape job market outcomes, productivity and firm ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The productivity slowdown and the declining labor share: a neoclassical exploration

We explore the possibility that a global productivity slowdown is responsible for the widespread decline in the labor share of national income. In a neoclassical growth model with endogenous human capital accumulation a ...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-level analysis

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immig...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics:

Gender gaps and the rise of the service economy

This paper investigates the role of the rise in services in the narrowing of gender gaps in hours and wages in recent decades. We highlight the between-industry component of differential gender trends for the United Stat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Healthy business? Managerial education and management in healthcare

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals that are closer t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are ideas getting harder to find?

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide r...Read more...

Journal article

Scientific Reports:

In search of features that constitute an "enriched environment" in humans: Associations between geographical properties and brain structure

Enriched environments elicit brain plasticity in animals. In humans it is unclear which environment is enriching. Living in a city has been associated with increased amygdala activity in a stress paradigm, and being brou...Read more...

Journal article

Harvard Business Review:

Why do we undervalue competent management?

Business schools teach MBA students that you can't compete on the basis of management processes because they're easily copied. Operational effectiveness is table stakes in the competitive universe, according to the strat...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Local Economic Impacts of Regeneration Projects: Evidence from UK's Single Regeneration Budget

We study the local economic impacts of a major regeneration programme aimed at enhancing the quality of life of local people in deprived neighbourhoods in the UK. The analysis is based on a panel of firm and area level d...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Road to recovery? Economic benefits of new infrastructure

New investment in roads can produce economic benefits, even in mature infrastructure networks like the UK’s, according to research by Henry Overman and colleagues. At the same time, they argue, improved evaluation of new...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Economics of a good night's sleep

Parents whose sleep quality is reduced by young children waking them in the night are less likely to work, work shorter hours and/or earn less than otherwise similar people who enjoy a good night’s sleep. The negative la...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The UK's New Industrial Strategy

‘Industrial strategy’ has returned to the policy agenda, with the government recently setting out its plans in a Green Paper, and dedicated sections appearing in the election manifestos of all three main parties. Until r...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

New Road Infrastructure: The Effects on Firms

This paper estimates the impact of new road infrastructure on employment and labour productivity using plant level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured through changes in accessib...Read more...

CEP real wages update

The Return of Falling Real Wages

The falling real wages experienced by most UK workers between 2008 and 2014 were followed by modest growth in 2015 and 2016. But it has now reversed back as real wages have once again started to fall. This is courtesy of...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Is modern technology responsible for jobless recoveries?

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. W...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Turbulence, firm decentralization and growth in bad times

What is the optimal form of firm organization during 'bad times'? The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information increases (the 'localist' view). On t...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Gender Inequality and Economic Development: Fertility, Education and Norms

We document the evolution of gender inequality in labour market outcomes—earnings, labour supply and wage rates—over the path of economic development, and present evidence on the potential reasons for this evolution. To ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happiness at work

Happiness is typically defined by how people experience and evaluate their lives as a whole. Since the majority of people spend much of their lives at work, it is critically important to gain a solid understanding of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parental sleep and employment: evidence from a British cohort study

We show that sleep deprivation exerts a strong negative effect on labour market performance. We exploit variations in child sleep quality to instrument for parental sleep quality. A one-hour reduction in sleep duration s...Read more...

CEP report

UK growth: a new chapter

The UK Economy is at a critical juncture. Leaving the EU creates economic challenges that necessitate widespread policy change. But this also generates an opportunity to tackle some of the long-standing challenges which ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Agglomeration externalities and urban growth controls

How can land use policy enhance the exploitation of external urban agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we show that the second-best land use policy constrains city creation, while subsidizing (t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How universities boost economic growth

The expansion of higher education has helped to fuel economic growth around the world, according to research by Anna Valero and John Van Reenen. Analysing data on 15,000 universities in 78 countries for the period since ...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Vocational vs. General Education and Employment over the Life-Cycle: New Evidence from PIAAC

It has been argued that vocational education facilitates the school-to-work transition but reduces later adaptability to changing environments. Using the recent international PIAAC data, we confirm such a trade-off over ...Read more...

Journal article

Annual Review of Economics:

The evolution of gender gaps in industrialized countries

Women in developed economies have made major advancements in labor markets throughout the past century, but remaining gender differences in pay and employment seem remarkably persistent. This article documents long-run t...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Income and Wealth:

Economic Growth Evens Out Happiness: Evidence from Six Surveys

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern gro...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Policy:

Competition and norms: a self-defeating combination?

This paper investigates the effects of information feedback mechanisms on electricity and heating usage at a student hall of residence in London. In a randomised control trial, we formulate different treatments such as f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic impact of universities: evidence from across the globe

We develop a new dataset using UNESCO source materials on the location of nearly 15,000 universities in about 1,500 regions across 78 countries, some dating back to the 11th Century. We estimate fixed effects models at t...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Quantifying the sources of firm heterogeneity

We develop and structurally estimate a model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms that can be used to decompose the firm-size distribution into the contributions of costs, "appeal" (quality or taste), markups, and product...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Impact of Structural Reforms on Regional Growth: Distance to the Frontier Matters

This paper aims to understand the impact of nation-wide structural policies on the productivity growth of OECD regions. In particular we explore how this impact varies with the productivity gap of regions with their coun...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Why leaving the EU would almost certainly damage our economic prospects

The economic consequences of leaving the EU have been a central focus of the referendum campaign. As June 23 draws near, Jagjit Chadha, Paul Johnson and John Van Reenen bring together the conclusions from their research ...Read more...

CEP Brexit analysis

BREXIT 2016: policy analysis from the Centre for Economic Performance

On June 23rd, the British people will vote in a referendum over whether or not to remain in the European Union. It is the most important vote that most of us will have in our lifetimes. And one that will have major reper...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management as a technology?

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 fi...Read more...

CEP Brexit analysis

Brexit and the impact of immigration on the UK

A reduction in immigration from the European Union (EU) following a vote for Brexit would not lead to any improvement in living standards for those born in the UK. Cuts in EU immigration would not offset the big fall in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exporter dynamics and partial-year effects

Two identical firms that start exporting in different months, one each in January and December, will report dramatically different exports for the first calendar year. This partial-year effect biases down first year expo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The elusive employment effect of the minimum wage

There is a huge body of empirical research on the employment effect of the minimum wage that has failed to clearly demonstrate the negative effect that so many economists strongly believe to find. This paper reviews the ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Building the City: Urban Transition and Institutional Frictions

We model the building of a city, estimate parameters of the model, and calculate welfare losses from institutional frictions encountered in changing land-use. We distinguish formal and slum construction technologies; in ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Subways and Urban Growth: Evidence from Earth

We investigate the relationship between the extent of a city’s subway network, its population and its spatial configuration. To accomplish this investigation, for the 632 largest cities in the world, we construct panel d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rethinking deindustrialization

Manufacturing in high-income countries is on the decline and Denmark is no exception. Manufacturing employment and the number of firms have been shrinking as a share of the total and in absolute levels. This paper uses a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

State capacity and public goods: institutional change, human capital and growth in early modern Germany

What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study legal reforms that established mass public education and increased state capacity in German cities during the 1500s. These fundam...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management practices, workforce selection and productivity

Recent research suggests that much of the cross-firm variation in measured productivity is due to differences in use of advanced management practices. Many of these practices – including monitoring, goal setting, and the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Special and differential treatment for developing countries

Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries (SDT) constitutes a central feature of the GATT/WTO system. Its formal goal is to foster export-led growth in developing countries. Its theoretical foundations ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The evolution of gender gaps in industrialized countries

Women in developed economies have made major inroads in labor markets throughout the past century, but remaining gender differences in pay and employment seem remarkably persistent. This paper documents long-run trends i...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The (Displacement) Effects of Spatially Targeted Enterprise Initiatives: Evidence from UK LEGI

We investigate the impacts of a significant area-based intervention (LEGI) that aimed to increase employment and entrepreneurial activity in 30 disadvantaged areas across England. We examine the spatial pattern of effect...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Stagnation traps

We provide a Keynesian growth theory in which pessimistic expectations can lead to very persistent, or even permanent, slumps characterized by unemployment and weak growth. We refer to these episodes as stagnation traps,...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Dynamic selection: An idea flows theory of entry, trade, and growth

This article develops an idea flows theory of trade and growth with heterogeneous firms. Entrants learn from incumbent firms, and the diffusion technology is such that learning depends not on the frontier technology, but...Read more...

CEP real wages update

Slowing UK Wage Growth

We have previously examined the path of nominal and real wages in the UK (Blanchflower and Machin, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). In that work, we expressed the view that in recent years there has been sufficient slack in the lab...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Balanced growth despite Uzawa

Evidence for the United States suggests balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and less than unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theore...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Trade induced technical change? The impact of Chinese imports on innovation, IT and productivity

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change - patenting, IT, and TFP - using new panel data across twelve European countries from 1996 to 2007. In particular, we establish th...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Income and Population Growth

Do populations grow as countries become richer? In this study we estimate the effects on population growth of shocks to national income that are plausibly exogenous and unlikely to be driven by technological change. For ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The persistence of a banking crisis

This paper analyses the effects of bank lending on GDP and employment. Following losses on international financial markets in 2008/09, a large German bank cut its lending to the German economy. I exploit variation in dep...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Commuting, migration and local employment elasticities

Many changes in the economic environment are local, including policy changes and infrastructure investments. The effect of these changes depends crucially on the ability of factors to move in response. Therefore a key ob...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Spatial Decay in Commuting Probabilities: Employment Potential vs. Commuting Gravity

We show that an employment potential capitalisation model, which establishes a spatial relationship between the price of land and the spatial distribution of employment through a transport matrix, produces estimates of t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early maternal employment and non-cognitive outcomes in early childhood and adolescence: evidence from British birth cohort data

We analyse the relationship between early maternal employment and child emotional and behavioural outcomes in early childhood and adolescence. Using rich data from a cohort of children born in the UK in the early 1990s, ...Read more...

CEP real wages update

UK real wages: a long way to go

Prospects for a boost in the real wages of UK workers remain bleak, despite some commentators still continuing to paint a more optimistic picture. This report, the latest in a new series of CEP Real Wages Updates, notes ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New media, competition and growth: European cities After Gutenberg

This research studies how variations in competition and in media content characterized the use and impact of Gutenberg's printing press technology during the European Renaissance. The research constructs annual firm-leve...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Big Plant Closures and Agglomeration Economies

This paper analyses the effects of large manufacturing plant closures on local employment. Specifically, we estimate the net employment effects of the closure of 45 large manufacturing plants in Spain, which relocated ab...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Immigration, Housing Discrimination and Employment

We use a new data set on Italy and a novel identification strategy to analyse the relationship between migrants' employment status and the percentage of non-Italians living nearby. Our data contain information at the ver...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Gender Gaps in the UK Labour Market: jobs, pay and family-friendly policies

Differences in the labour market experiences of men and women have fallen over the last 20 years, but there are still sizeable ‘gender gaps’ in employment and wages. Certain factors help to explain a good part of gender ...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Real Wages and Living Standards

Real wages and living standards have taken a hard hit in the UK in the recent past. Real wages of the typical (median) UK worker have fallen by almost 10% since 2008 and median family incomes have significantly fallen fo...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Austerity: Growth Costs and Post-Election Plans

The austerity programme of the coalition government knocked at least one percent per year off growth in the first two years of this Parliament. In retrospect, this looks like a mistake and the slower pace of austerity in...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of immigration on the local labor market outcomes of blue collar workers: panel data evidence

Using a large administrative French panel data set for 1976-2007, we examine how low- educated immigration affects the wages, employment, occupations and locations of blue-collar native workers. The natives in the sample...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Voting behaviour and public employment in Nazi Germany

This paper analyses whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after their rise to power in 1933. Using data on public employment in the armed forces, public administrations and ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Business cycle blues

People do not psychologically benefit from economic expansions nearly as much as they suffer from recessions, according to research by JanEmmanuel De Neve and colleagues....Read more...

CentrePiece article

After communism: 25 years of revolution

A quarter of a century after the transition to a capitalist economy began, how are the nations of the former Soviet bloc faring? Peter Boone charts the failures of communism, the chaos that followed its collapse, the per...Read more...

CEP policy analysis

The impact of 'clean innovation' on economic growth: evidence from the transport and energy industries'

Policies on climate change that encourage 'clean innovation' while displacing 'dirty innovation' could have a positive impact on short-term economic growth while avoiding the potentially disastrous reduction in GDP that ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Employment and Technological Change: On the Geography of Labour Market Adjustments

This paper investigates the impact of technological change on local labour market outcomes in Britain. Using a newly assembled panel database for the period 2000-2007 and a directly observed measure of technological chan...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic growth evens-out happiness: evidence from six surveys

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern gro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The asymmetric experience of positive and negative economic growth: global evidence using subjective well-being data

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? Using subjective well-being data, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth is experienced. We find that mea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge spillovers from clean and dirty technologies

How much should governments subsidize the development of new clean technologies? We use patent citation data to investigate the relative intensity of knowledge spillovers in clean and dirty technologies in two technologi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

The impact of a carbon tax on manufacturing: Evidence from microdata

We estimate the impact of a carbon tax on manufacturing plants using panel data from the UK production census. Our identification strategy builds on the comparison of outcomes between plants subject to the full tax and p...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

Dynamic selection: an idea flows theory of entry, trade and growth

This paper develops an idea flows theory of trade and growth with heterogeneous firms. New firms learn from incumbent firms, but the diffusion technology ensures entrants learn not only from frontier technologies, but fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Biomarkers and long-term market outcomes: the case of creatine

Using the Young Finns Study (YFS) combined with the Finnish Linked Employer-Employee Data (FLEED) we show that quantities of creatine measured in 1980 prior to labour market entry affect labour market outcomes over the p...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Dynemp: a Stata® routine for distributed micro-data analysis of business dynamics

This paper introduces a new Stata® command, dynemp, which implements a distributed micro-data analysis of business and employment dynamics and firm demographics. The data source it requires are business registers or comp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The dynamics of employment growth: new evidence from 18 countries

Motivated by the on-going interest of policy makers in the sources of job creation, this paper presents results from a new OECD project on the dynamics of employment (DynEmp) based on an innovative methodology using firm...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Winners and losers from a commodities-for-manufactures trade boom

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winne...Read more...

Blog

LSE American Politics and Policy Blog:

Firms with more structured management practices are more productive, innovative and have faster employment growth.

In 2010, the US Census Bureau conducted the first large-scale survey of management practices in America, gathering data on more than 30,000 manufacturing plants. Nicholas Bloom and colleagues find strong links between es...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Falling real wages

The researchers note that there have been historically unprecedented falls in UK real wages since the start of the Great Recession. What’s more, the long US experience of stagnant real wages (median real weekly earnings ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Minimum wages: the economics and the politics

The UK’s national minimum wage has tackled extreme low pay – but the wider problem of low pay remains as serious as ever. That is one of the conclusions of Professor Alan Manning in a discussion of the growing popularity...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The new empirical economics of management

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP diff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of mandatory entitlement to paid leave on employment in the UK

I evaluate the impact of the UK Working Time Regulations 1998, which introduced mandatory paid holiday entitlement. The regulation gave (nearly) all workers the right to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid holiday per a year. W...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trapped factors and China's impact on global growth

When China’s accession to the WTO exposed European firms to import competition, they responded by increasing their investment in innovation. This response was stronger in industries and firms where factors of production ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Mrs Thatcher's industrial legacy

John Van Reenen examines the 'unbalancing' of Britain's economy away from manufacturing since 1979....Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics and Policy Blog:

The state of the UK economy: Diagnosis, prognosis and recommended treatment

The UK economy has experienced a prolonged period of weakness over the last five years. John Van Reenen writes that the real problems for the UK are inadequate long-run investment in infrastructure, innovation and human ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... 'Smart and illicit': the making of a successful entrepreneur

Smart teenagers who engage in illicit activities are much more likely to become entrepreneurs, according to research by Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein. But, they note, being self-employed doesn’t necessarily make someon...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Local Institutions and Local Economic Growth: The State of the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England - A National Survey

This study seeks to take stock of where the LEPs are at and where they are heading by analysing their strategies and priorities, organisation and governance, resources, effectiveness and working relations, innovations, l...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Medium and long run prospects for UK growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis

The productivity performance of the UK economy in the period 1990-2007 was excellent. Based entirely on pre-crisis data, and using a two-sector growth model, I project the future growth rate of GDP per hour in the market...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does uncertainty reduce growth? Using disasters as natural experiments

A growing body of evidence suggests that uncertainty is counter cyclical, rising sharply in recessions and falling in booms. But what is the causal relationship between uncertainty and growth? To identify this we constru...Read more...

Book

Investing for Prosperity
A manifesto for growth

Why is economic growth such a rare and elusive butterfly in the UK garden? What institutions and policies are needed to sustain UK economic growth in the dynamic global economy of the twenty-first century? After yea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Smart and illicit: who becomes an entrepreneur and does it pay?

We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between “entrepreneurs” and other business owners. The incorporated self-employed have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncogniti...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Immigration, offshoring, and American jobs

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Regional growth and regional decline

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of...Read more...

CEP report

The UK productivity and jobs puzzle: does the answer lie in labour market flexibility?

GDP per worker fell for the five years after 2008 which is unprecedented in post war UK history. In this paper we argue that “capital shallowing” (i.e. the fall in the capital-labour ratio) could be the main reason for t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Urban Wage Growth Premium: Sorting or Learning?

This paper is concerned with the urban wage premium and addresses two central issues about which the field has not yet reached a consensus. First, the extent to which sorting of high ability individuals into urban areas ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The financial resource curse

This paper presents a model of financial resource curse, i.e. episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth. We study a two-sector, tradable and non-tradable, small open economy. Th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation, reallocation and growth

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A key feature is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mental health: the new frontier for labour economics

This lecture argues that mental health is a major factor of production. It is the biggest single influence on life satisfaction, with mental health eight years earlier a more powerful explanatory factor than current inco...Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics and Policy Blog:

No Triple Dip does not mean a good recovery for the UK

John Van Reenen reacts to the news this week that the UK has avoided economic contraction in the last quarter. Whilst Osborne may see this as cause to celebrate, there is nothing commendable about an economy that continu...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Does management matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investiga...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

New Road Infrastructure: the Effects on Firms

This paper estimates the impact of road improvements on firm employment and productivity using plant level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured by changes in employment accessibil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reserve Accumulation, Growth and Financial Crises

We present a model that reproduces two salient facts characterizing the international monetary system: i) Faster growing countries are associated with lower net capital inflows and ii) Countries that grow faster accumula...Read more...

CEP report

Fiscal consolidation during a depression

In 2009-10, the UK's budget deficit was about 11 per cent of GDP. A credible plan for fiscal consolidation was introduced in the UK over the fiscal years 2011-12 to 2016-17. In this paper, we assess the impact of the sca...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Total Factor Productivity Growth in Local Economic Partnership Regions in Britain, 1997-2008

This paper decomposes aggregate TFP growth in Britain for 1997-2008 to show the contribution of different LEPs and the role played by manufacturing and services and UK- and foreign-owned plants within these LEPs. These c...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Effect of Public Sector Employment on Local Labour Markets

This paper considers the impact of public sector employment on local labour markets. Using English data at the Local Authority level for 2003 to 2007 we find that public sector employment has no identifiable effect on to...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs

How do offshoring and immigration affect the employment of native workers? What kinds of jobs suffer, or benefit, most from the competition created by offshore and immigrant workers? In contrast to the existing literatur...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Self-Employment Measure Entrepreneurship? Evidence from Great Britain

Research on entrepreneurship often uses information on self-employment to proxy for business creation and innovative behaviour. However, little evidence has been collected on the link between these measures. In this pape...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Can industrial policy boost jobs?

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are common worldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. We exploit multiple changes in the area-specific el...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Great Britain's Second-Order City Regions in Recessions, 1978-2010

While it is now accepted that the 2008-09 recession accentuated regional differences in Britain, it is more difficult to identify the role of major cities, especially over a longer time scale. Using previously establishe...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

A Note on the Value of Foregone Open Space in Sprawling Cities

Foregone benefits of the open space that is sacrificed through urban sprawl are hard to quantify. We obtain a simple benchmark measure by introducing a demand for trips beyond the urban boundary into the monocentric city...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Flexible Employment and Cross-Regional Adjustment

Employment flexibility is commonly associated to greater labour mobility and thus faster cross-regional adjustments. The literature however offers very little hard evidence on this and quite limited theoretical guidance....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Some Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy

Business support policies designed to raise employment and productivity are ubiquitous around the world. We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to support manufacturing jobs thro...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are common worldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. We exploit multiple changes in the area-specific el...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Note on Schooling in Development Accounting

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Role of Educational Quality and Quantity in the Process of Economic Development

We develop a theory of human capital investment to study the channels through which students react to school quality when deciding on investments in secondary education and above, and to study how educational quality aff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mass Education or a Minority Well Educated Elite in the Process of Development: the Case of India

This paper analyses whether in developing countries mass education is more growth enhancing than to have a minority well educated elite. Using the Indian census data as a benchmark and enrollment rates at different level...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Agglomeration Externalities and Urban Growth Controls

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Rethinking the effect of immigration on wages

This paper calculates the effects of immigration on the wages of native US workers of various skill levels in two steps. In the first step we use labor demand functions to estimate the elasticity of substitution across d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Autoregressions in Small Samples, Priors about Observables and Initial Conditions

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modelled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven...Read more...

Book

Combatting Unemployment
IZA Prize in Labor Economics

Combatting Unemployment is a collection of key papers from seminal labour economists Richard Layard and Stephen J. Nickell. The authors received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2008 for their path-breaking work o...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

From ‘Plan B’ to ‘Plan V’: what the UK economy needs to reboot and rebalance growth

With the threat of stagflation and interest rate rises, the current economic climate shows little sign of improvement in the near future. John Van Reenen finds that the government’s severe austerity programme, with its v...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economics of Super-Diversity: Findings from British Cities, 2001-2006

British cities have a surprisingly long history of cultural diversity. Recently they have become significantly more multicultural, with ‘super-diversity’ emerging in many urban neighbourhoods. Public interest in these ch...Read more...

Book

The Labour Market in Winter
The State of Working Britain

This collection of essays - by leading economic experts on the UK labour market - provides an overview of the key issues concerning the performance of the labour market, and the policy issues surrounding it, with a f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade induced technical change? The impact of Chinese imports on innovation, IT and productivity

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change - patenting, IT, R&D, TFP and management practices – using new panel data across twelve European countries between 1996-2007. We c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Evolution of the Modern Worker: Attitudes to Work

This paper examines how employees’ experiences of, and attitudes towards, work have changed over the last quarter of a century. It assesses the extent to which any developments relate to the economic cycle and to trends ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Long Term Implications of the ICT Revolution: Applying the Lessons of Growth Theory and Growth Accounting

How big a boost to long run growth can countries expect from the ICT revolution? I use the results of growth accounting and the insights from a two-sector growth model to answer this question. The use of a two-sector rat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment, Inequality and the UK National Minimum Wage over the Medium-Term

This paper assesses the impact of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) on employment and inequality in the UK over the decade since its introduction in 1999. Identification is facilitated by using variation in the bite of the...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

To avoid creating a ‘lost generation’, with perhaps a fifth of all 18 year olds unemployed and outside training, a new push on apprenticeships would help

With record numbers of young people not gaining university places, the viability of apprenticeships could make a huge difference in preventing a ‘lost generation’ out of touch with the labour market. Dr Hilary Steedman o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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 for worldwide interbank telecommunication. We construct a new longitudinal dataset of 6,848 banks in 29 cou...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

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

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

CEP election analysis

Urban Renewal and Regional Growth: Muddled Objectives and Mixed Progress

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...

CEP discussion paper

Welfare Policy and the Distribution of Hours of Work

We examine the distribution of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities when sectors are divided into three groups: one that produces goods without home substitutes and two oth...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

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

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

CEP discussion paper

The Economic Situation of First- and Second-Generation Immigrants in France, Germany and the United Kingdom

A central concern about immigration is the integration into the labour market, not only of the first generation, but also of subsequent generations. Little comparative work exists for Europe’s largest economies. France, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does relative income matter? Are the critics right?

Do other peoples’ incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accounting for Research and Productivity Growth Across Industries

What factors underlie industry differences in research intensity and productivity growth? We develop a multi-sector endogenous growth model allowing for industry specific parameters in the production functions for output...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation and institutional ownership

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nes...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urban Growth Drivers in a Europe of Sticky People and Implicit Boundaries

We investigate urban GDP pc growth across the EU12 using data for functionally defined cities - rather than administrative regions. We test hypotheses on the role of human capital, EU integration and fragmentation of urb...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trading Places: Employers, Unions and the Manufacture of Voice

Using nationally representative workplace data for Britain we show that over the last quarter century union voice – especially union-only voice – has been associated with poorer climate, more industrial action, poorer fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mapping Prices into Productivity in Multisector Growth Models

Two issues related to mapping a multi-sector model into a reduced-form value-added model are often neglected: the composition of intermediate goods, and the distinction between value added productivity and gross output p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Tale of Two Countries: Unions, Closures and Growth in Britain and Norway

Using linked private sector employer-employee panel data for Britain and Norway we explore the effects of unionization on workplace closure and employment growth over the period 1997-2004. Unions prolonged the life of lo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Union Decline in Britain

This paper investigates the demise of unionisation in British private sector workplaces over the last quarter century. We show that dramatic union decline has occurred across all types of workplace. Although the union wa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Private Sector Employment Growth, 1998-2004: A Panel Analysis of British Workplaces

Using nationally representative panel data for British private sector workplaces this paper points to the importance of distinguishing between workplace and firm size when analysing employment growth, and finds that the ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

The part-time pay penalty for women in Britain

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This article tries to explain this part-time...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment Outcomes in the Welfare State

We examine the implications of tax and subsidy policies for employment in the 'three worlds of welfare', Anglo-Saxon, Continental European and Scandinavian. We argue that home production is key to a proper evaluation of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

CEP discussion paper

Technological Diversification

Economies at early stages of development are often shaken by abrupt changes in growth rates, whereas in advanced economies growth rates tend to be relatively stable. To explain this pattern, we propose a theory of techno...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor Search and Matching in Macroeconomics

The labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis. This paper provides a critical, selective survey of the literature. Four fundamental questions are explored: how are unemployment, job v...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Jeremy Greenwood and Per Krusell, 'Growth Accounting with Investment-Specific Technological Progress: A Discussion of Two Approaches' A Rejoinder

The May 2007 issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics published a paper of mine entitled ‘Investment-Specific Technological Progress and Growth Accounting’ which critiqued the work of Greenwood, Hercowitz and Krusell. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does the Underground Economy Hold Back Financial Deepening? Evidence from the Italian Credit Market

The paper investigates the relationship between underground activities and financial deepening. The access to external finance requires entrepreneurs to disclose credible information through formal documentation. This re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity Growth, Knowledge Flows and Spillovers

This paper explores the role of knowledge flows and TFP growth by using direct survey data on knowledge flows linked to firm-level TFP growth data. Our knowledge flow data correspond to the kind of information flows ofte...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Has the British National Minimum Wage Had Little or No Impact on Employment?

A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW). That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony, international labour standards, inspection and compliance and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Information Technology, Organisational Change and Productivity Growth: Evidence from UK Firms

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (?O) using UK firm data. Consistent with the small number of other micro studies we find (a) IT appears to have high retur...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Lousy and lovely jobs: the rising polarization of work in Britain

This paper shows that the United Kingdom since 1975 has exhibited a pattern of job polarization with rises in employment shares in the highest- and lowest-wage occupations. This is not entirely consistent with the idea o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Decomposing the Growth in Residential Land in the United States

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus increases in the land area used by individual households. Between 19...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Long-Term Consequences of Regional Specialization

What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be cost...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

American Economic Development Since the Civil War or the Virtue of Education

This paper is the first empirical framework that explains the phenomenon of fast growth combined with the demographic transition occurring in the United States since 1860. I propose a structural model that unifies those ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

An R&D-Based Model of Multi-Sector Growth

We develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model in which productivity growth is driven by the production of sector-specific knowledge. In the model, we find that long run differences in total factor productivity grow...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment and Hours of Work: The North Atlantic Divide Revisited

I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual Employee Voice: Renegotiation and Performance Management in Public Services

Periodically, the ‘zone of acceptance’ within which management may use its authority to direct employees’ work needs to be adapted to the changing needs of organisations. This article focuses especially on the non-codifi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Information and Communication Technologies in a Multi-Sector Endogenous Growth Model

This paper investigates the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on growth in an economy, consisting of three sectors, ICT-producing, ICT-using and non-ICT-using. The benefits from ICT come from the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trends in Hours and Economic Growth

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the structural transformation between agriculture, man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Voice Do British Workers Want?

The problems/need for representation and participation reported by workers vary across workplaces and by types of jobs. Workers with greater workplace needs are more desirous of unions but their preferences are fine-grai...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Patterns of Work Across the OECD

Market work per person of working age differs widely across the OECD countries and there have been some significant changes in the last forty years. How to explain this pattern? Taxes are part of the story but much remai...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and Growth with Heterogeneous Firms

This paper explores the impact of trade on growth when firms are heterogeneous. We find that greater openness produces anti-and pro-growth effects. The Melitz-model selection effects raises the expected cost of introduci...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Causes of sprawl: a portrait from space

We study the extent to which US urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30 x 30 metre c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Gender Gap in Early Career Wage Growth

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but after ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This paper explores the reason for this ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Ex Post Versus Ex Ante Measures of the User Cost of Capital

When doing growth accounting, should we use ex post or ex ante measures of user costs to calculate the contribution of capital? The answer, based on a simple model of temporary equilibrium, is that ex post is better in t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Employment Effects of the October 2003 Increase in the National Minimum Wage

There is a growing body of research that measures employment effects of the minimum wage by using longitudinal data on individuals to compare job loss of workers affected by a minimum wage increase with those who are not...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New Survey Evidence on Recent Changes in UK Union Recognition

This paper reports results from a recent survey we conducted on the union status of over 650 firms in the private sector of the UK. Compared to earlier periods, the survey shows that since 1997 there has been a slight fa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Part-Time Pay Penalty

In 2003, women working part-time in the UK earned, on average, 22% less than women working full-time. Compared to women who work FT, PT women are more likely to have low levels of education, to be in a couple, to have yo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Job Security and Job Protection

We construct indicators of the perception of job security for various types of jobs in 12 European countries using individual data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We then consider the relation between...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is Poland the Next Spain?

We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity Growth and Employment: Theory and Panel Estimates

Theoretical predictions of the effect of TFP growth on employment are ambiguous, and depend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We estimate a model for employment, wages and investment with an ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalisation, ICT and the Nitty Gritty of Plant Level Datasets

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

Chapter

Mobility and joblessness

in Seeking A Premier Economy: The Economic Effects Of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000

The perceived impact of location on economic opportunity has been a constant refrain in discussions of the economic performance of the United Kingdom for as long as anyone can remember and the source of much feeling th...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

Gender Segregation in Employment Contracts

This paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 EU countries, using micro data from the ECHPS. Women are over-represented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in north...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment and Taxes

This paper considers the impact of taxation policy on market work. On the basis of the evidence, we find that a 10 percentage point rise in the tax wedge will reduce overall labour input provided via the market by around...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Threshold Effects and Firm Size: the Case of Firing Costs

We study the role of employment protection legislation (EPL) in determining firm size distribution. In many countries the provisions of EPL are more stringent for firms above certain size thresholds. We construct a simpl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Statistical Framework for the Analysis of Productivity and Sustainable Development

To analyse the consequences of the changing economic structure of the UK, we need a set of statistics broken down by industry that are consistent with the whole economy measures available from the national accounts. The ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Balanced Growth With Structural Change

We study a multi-sector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of a balanced aggregate growth path, with all aggregates growing at the sam...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Vocational Qualifications on the Labour Market Outcomes of Low-Achieving School-Leavers

This paper creates a pseudo cohort of individuals who left school in the mid-1990s, using Labour Force Survey. The extent of low achievement at school amongst this group is documented, and then the impact of such low ach...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Public Enterprises and Labor Market Performance

This paper shows that state control of some industries may have contributed to the increase in European unemployment from the 1970s to the early 1990s. We develop a simple model with both publicly-run and privately-run e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Employment of Married Mothers in Great Britain: 1974-2000

This paper analyses the increase in mothers¿ employment in Britain over the period 1974¿2000. The approach consists of isolating those birth cohorts whose mothers experienced significant increases in employment and relat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Falling Trade Costs, Heterogeneous Firms and Industry Dynamics

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade cost...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Aggregate Growth and the Efficiency of Labour Reallocation

We consider the potential importance of labour market efficiency for aggregate growth. The idea is that efficient labour markets move workers more quickly from low to high productivity sites, thereby raising aggregate pr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment After Motherhood: A European Comparison

There is theoretical evidence that economic and family policies have an important impact on mother's employment. The aim of this article is to study empirically the women's transitions from employment to non-employment...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

City Size Distributions As A Consequence of the Growth Process

The size distribution of cities in many countries follows some broadly regular patterns. Any good theory of city size distributions should (i) be able to account for this regularity, but also (ii) rely on a plausible eco...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment Penalty After Motherhood In Spain

This paper investigates whether there exists an employment penalty from motherhood in Spain. In particular, we are interested in transitions from employment to non-employment and downward occupational mobility. Results s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumption and Savings with Unemployment Risk: Implications for Optimal Employment Contracts

This paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. O...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology Dissemination and Economic Growth: Some Lessons for the New Economy

This paper attempts to draw lessons for the New Economy from what economists know about technology dissemination and economic growth. It argues that what is most notable about the New Economy is that it is knowledge-driv...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Agglomeration Dynamics

This paper develops a model of economic growth and activity locating endogenously on a 3-dimensional featureless global geography. The same economic forces influence simulataneously growth, convergence, and spatial agglo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Company Start-Up Costs and Employment

I study the role of company start-up costs for employment performance. The model is search equilibrium with a new concept for firms. Agents have an innate managerial ability and make a career choice to become either mana...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring the Cost Effectiveness of an R&D Tax Credit for the UK

This paper investigates the economic impact of the government's proposed new UK R&D tax credit. We measure the benefit of the credit by the effect on value added in the short and long?run. This is simulated from existin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Education and Italian Regional Development

Given recent emphasis on externality to education, macroeconomic studies have a role to play in the analysis of return to schooling. In this paper we study the connection between growth and human capital in a convergence...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technological Innovation and Performance in the United Kingdom

Over the period since 1970, Britain has improved its relative productivity performance, but there remains a significant gap in market sector productivity between Britain and both Continental Europe and the United States....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Zipfs Law for Cities: An Empirical Examination

We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 û 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Evolution of the US Urban System

We test implications of economic geography models for location, size and growth of cities with US Census data for 1900 û 1990. Our tests involve non-parametric estimations of stochastic kernels for the distributions of c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Macroeconomic Policies and Achievements in Transition Economies, 1989-1999

The paper discusses the reasons for the observed variation in the sequencing, speed and content of reform policies, in the 1990s, among 25 post-socialist countries of Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union. It argues...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment Patterns in OECD Countries

This paper studies the dynamics of labour demand and the determinants of employment rates across the OECD. We find: (i) labour demand adjusts less rapidly when employment protection is more strict and union density is hi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cross Country Growth Comparison: Theory to Empirics

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth û both empiric...Read more...

Book

The State of Working Britain

What are the prospects for the British labour market at the start of the new century? Since the 1960s Britain has experienced a series of profound changes affecting the way of life and work. This overview and analys...Read more...