Results

CentrePiece article

In brief... How citizens help expose environmental wrongdoing

Does enabling citizens to complain about public services provide an effective way of improving government services, or should we be concerned about the accuracy and reliability of such reports? Jonathan Colmer, Mary Evan...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Peer pressure and manager pressure in organisations

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

CEP discussion paper

Environmental citizen complaints

Citizen complaints feature prominently in public oversight contexts. The nature and effects of complaints, however, are controversial and poorly understood. Here, we exploit novel administrative data on over 130,000 envi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Trade, structural transformation, and development: evidence from Argentina 1869-1914

We provide new theory and evidence on the role of external and internal integration in structural transformation and economic development, using Argentina's integration into the world economy in the late nineteenth centu...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Monitoring and evaluating during the Covid-19 recovery

Helene Donnat summarises the discussion from the What Works Growth's fifth Economic Recovery workshop, exploring the challenges places are facing in undertaking good quality monitoring and evaluation....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Medical marijuana laws and mental health in the United States

The consequences of legal access to medical marijuana for individual welfare are a matter of controversy. We contribute to the ongoing discussion by evaluating the impact of the staggered introduction and extension of me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

External integration, structural transformation and economic development: evidence from Argentina

This paper uses the natural experiment of Argentina?s integration into world markets in the late-nineteenth century to provide evidence on the role of internal geography in shaping the effects of external integration. We...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

CEP discussion paper

Regional Trade Agreements

This paper reviews the theoretical and the empirical literature on regionalism. The formation of regional trade agreements has been, by far, the most popular form of reciprocal trade liberalization in the last fifteen ye...Read more...

Journal article

Behaviour Research and Therapy:

Improving access to psychological therapy: initial evaluation of two UK demonstration sites

Recently the UK Government announced an unprecedented, large-scale initiative for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) for depression and anxiety disorders. Prior to this development, the Department of Heal...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The ASEAN Free Trade Agreement: Impact on Trade Flows and External Trade Barriers

Using detailed data on trade and tariffs from 1992-2007, we examine how the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement has affected trade with non-members and external tariffs facing non-members. First, we examine the effect of preferen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Regionalism Affect Trade Liberalization Towards Non-Members?

We examine the effect of regionalism on unilateral trade liberalization using industry-level data on applied MFN tariffs and bilateral preferences for ten Latin American countries from 1990 to 2001. We find that preferen...Read more...

Manpower Human Resource Lab paper

Leeway for the Loyal: A Model of Employee Discretion

This paper examines the factors underlying task discretion from an economist?s perspective. It argues that the key axis for understanding discretion is the trade-off between the positive effects of discretion on potentia...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Workers' Remittances Reduce the Probability of Current Account Reversals?

The paper combines the literature on financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies with that on international migrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers? remittances can h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Financial Globalization and Exchange Rates

The founders of the Bretton Woods System sixty years ago were primarily concerned with orderly exchange rate adjustment in a world economy that was characterized by widespread restrictions on international capital mobili...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is Seniority-Based Pay Used as a Motivation Device? Evidence from Plant Level Data

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used as a motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simply be a wage setting rule not n...Read more...