Results

Blog

Fabian Society:

The Budget 2026

Anna Valero writes that the budget gives a clear direction of travel, but delivery as well as intent will determine success....Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Company wage policy in a low-wage labour market

In many countries, minimum wage policies allow employers to pay young workers less than adults, and the UK is now debating how fast to phase out its lower youth minima. But do employers actually use the room that age-spe...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

The 2026 Budget buys stability and points in the right direction on growth

The 2026 Budget builds on the back of strong economic growth in the first half of the year. The overall direction of travel is clear and positive, writes Anna Valero. But the challenges of protecting investment and econo...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Budget 2026 - continuity with Reeves

John Healey's 2026 Budget follows the fiscal foundations set down by Rachel Reeves, writes John Van Reenen. But while stability has been preserved, many tough decisions including welfare reform and funding increasing hea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Thin markets, thick subsidies: local competition and the incidence of heat pump grants

We study how local supply shapes the incidence and quantity response of clean-technology subsidies. In October 2023, the UK government increased the grant for air-source heat pumps from #5,000 to #7,500 in England and Wa...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies: Forthcoming

Conversations at scale: robust AI-led interviews

The advent of large language models (LLMs) creates new opportunities to conduct qualitative interviews at scale, with thousands of respondents, thereby bridging qualitative and quantitative methods. We develop a simple, ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The returns to viral media

Social media has lowered the barriers to political communication, allowing politicians to reach large audiences without relying on traditional media. Yet easier access does not imply an equal distribution of attention. T...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Losing their religion

This paper studies whether governments can change social norms that constrain women's education and work, and through which mechanism. Albania's 1967 religion ban, which created the world's first atheist state, provides ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Which types of education raise firm productivity? Evidence for managers and workers in the UK

This paper estimates the firm productivity returns to degree field, institution quality, and degree level, and compares them with wage returns. I link a LinkedIn panel from Revelio Labs to Orbis financial accounts for ov...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A double-differences approach to inference in regression discontinuity designs with a discrete running variable

We present a new approach to nonparametric inference in regression discontinuity designs where the running variable is discrete and may have few support points. The approach is based on an intuitive and comparatively wea...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Does falling migration spell trouble for the Budget?

Migration rates to the UK are falling. That might sound politically advantageous for a government that is trying to show it has immigration under control, but some argue that it could in fact spell economic trouble for t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Teachers are at their strictest in middle age

Read more...

CentrePiece article

Why don't we have nicer buildings?

Distinctive urban architecture is a benefit, but few want to pay for it...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The childcare track

One in three women and one in six men leave academia after becoming a parent...Read more...

CentrePiece article

EV growth driven by batteries, not oil shocks

As the electric vehicle network reaches a tipping point, the economics changes and the link with oil prices breaks...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Maritime chokepoints

World trade remains dangerously dependent on a handful of shipping lanes...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Tariff confusion

The way that US tariffs were announced doubled their negative impact...Read more...

CentrePiece article

AI or remote working: which broke the career ladder?

Disentangling the reasons for the sharp fall in entry-level hiring...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal: Forthcoming

The Immigration Surplus Revisited

We extend the immigration surplus results of Borjas (1995). In a closed competitive constant-returns economy, we show that an influx of migrants (holding their skill mix fixed) must increase the total real income of nati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation partnerships for development along green value chains

Growth and development success stories are often linked to new technological waves and innovation success. Green technologies emerge as a new technology category in which innovation quality in Emerging and Developing Eco...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A network approach to geopolitics

We develop a tractable framework for analyzing geopolitics as a network of coordination and strategic influence. Countries choose geopolitical actions that trade off domestic interests against incentives to align with co...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

Peer effects in education

The identification of peer effects is challenging. There are many factors not related to social influences that could explain correlations among peers. Peers have been shown to affect many important outcomes, including a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics:

Is the rise in home schooling down to mental health?

There has been a marked increase in the rates of home schooling in the UK since Covid. David Frayman and Ben Helme look into the causes behind this increase, and argue that a rise in mental health issues among young peop...Read more...

Government consultation

Commons Treasury Committee

Anna Valero gave evidence to the committee as part of its Budget 2026 inquiry. The purpose of the session is to assess the UK's macroeconomic and fiscal position, and the key pressures on the Chancellor ahead of his firs...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Detecting institutional change as it unfolds: Evidence from 120 years of reporting

Explaining comparative economic development requires identifying the causes of institutional change. This column uses AI to analyse 120 years of newspaper coverage and produce a new index of uncertainty about a country's...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who can produce what? Firm capabilities and product entry

Which firms supply which products? Modelling multi-product firms under heterogeneous markups, we recover firms? costs for produced products and develop an algorithm inspired by recommender systems to predict costs for un...Read more...

Blog

Banque de France:

Generative AI: the first changes in the labour market are affecting young people

Since the end of 2022, permanent contract hires among young people have fallen more markedly in occupations where tasks can most easily be performed or assisted by generative AI. Contract terminations are also declining,...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Disparate treatment of the Irish in 19th century English courtrooms

This paper studies the effect of anti-Irish sentiment on 19th-century English jury decisions in criminal trials from London's Old Bailey. Using surnames to measure perceived ethnicity, Irish-named defendants were 3% more...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Location choice when the number of jobs matters: matching in spatial equilibrium

The idea that people want to go to where the jobs are is intuitive, yet is absent from the standard quantitative spatial modelling approach in which location choices are guided by prices, without reference to quantities ...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Keeping it in the family: student to degree match

This paper examines systematic inequalities in the sorting of students to university degree programs with regards to first-in-family (FIF) to attend university and gender. Using linked administrative data on the populati...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Why are good jobs concentrated in certain places?

Good jobs exist everywhere in the UK - but the highest-paying roles remain heavily concentrated in London and the South East, and a small number of cities. Structural change has reinforced these patterns, raising difficu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying non-tariff barriers: Brexit, input sourcing and firm performance

How successful is European integration in removing non-tariff trade barriers? We study how Brexit affected UK firms' input sourcing and sales. The post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) reduced sales and input...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Organizing expertise with externalities: evidence from primary care

Many modern organizations use knowledge hierarchies, where frontline workers try to resolve tasks and pass those they cannot resolve to experts. But the implications of this organization of expertise are not well underst...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The labour market dynamics of households: eyes down for a full house

Little is known about the dynamic factors that shape movements in household labour market stocks. Expanding on the literature used to analyse individual labour market flows, we apply and extend dynamic techniques to the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is it psychologically dangerous to live in a rich area? Evidence from census-matched micro data on UK suicides

This paper uses micro data on UK suicides to implement a new test of relative-deprivation theory. Research into the potential consequences of relative comparisons had in the past had to rely on subjective data on wellbei...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

England's strong performance of immigrant children in PISA

England's strong performance at the latest PISA results has been widely put down to recent reforms. But that explanation ignores a striking finding: children from immigrant backgrounds outperformed their native-backgroun...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

AI and labour market inequalities: Three starting points for discussion

One thing experts on 'the future of work' agree on is that disruptions driven by AI require us to completely rethink of the role of government in the labour market. Sir Christopher Pissarides and Kirsten Sehnbruch outlin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring the prevalence and direction of innovation: a pilot approach using LLMs

This paper pilots a method for measuring firms' product and process innovation at scale. Our approach uses LLMs to complete a detailed innovation survey for a sample of 600,000 companies operating across 40 countries. Th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Revisiting test score forecasts and teacher value-added

We develop a framework for comparing forecasts in teacher value-added models. We apply it to interpret the teacher-switching test of Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014), showing that the teacher-switching coefficient ca...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity in teams: double crewing for police

Whether working in a team or alone results in higher productivity has been extensively studied in many settings, often being a controversial issue. This is none more so than for the police. Whether single or double crewi...Read more...

CEP report

Skills for growth: what the UK can learn from international approaches for incentivising employer-based training

This report reviews international evidence on approaches to increasing employer investment in training, focusing on three broad models: coordination between employers and training providers; sector-based employment and t...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why some firms adopt AI before others - skills and connectivity matter more than size

Which companies become early adopters of artificial intelligence, giving them a head start in the productivity race? By studying firms in Turkey, Nuriye Melisa Bilgin and Gianmarco Ottaviano find that firm size tells onl...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics: Forthcoming

Caring in the time of austerity

The years after the election of the UK's coalition government in 2010 saw a decline in central funding to local government and a fall in expenditure on a range of local services, including social services. These cuts wer...Read more...

Blog

LSE United States Politics and Policy:

Confusing US tariff announcements doubled the decline in trade

During 2025 the US administration made more than 50 tariff-related announcements. In new research, Kalina Manova, Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson and Aaron Tang examine how the complexity of these announcements disrupted US ...Read more...

Journal article

International Economic Review:

Scientific isolation? The consequences of Trump's China initiative on Chinese research

The 2018 China Initiative by the Trump administration complicated procedures and reduced funding for US-China research collaborations. Using Scopus data, we analyze its impact on Chinese research. We find that it signifi...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Growth through innovation bursts: Why industrial policy should not bet on size

Industrial policy is back on the agenda across advanced economies, with a growing channelling support towards large incumbent firms on the premise that they are the most capable innovators. This column uses data on Frenc...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Tariff confusion

The year 2025 was unprecedented in the frequency, complexity, and volatility of US trade policy interventions. This column uses a new database tracking US tariff announcements during the year to show that confusion about...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Ukraine's labour market has been surprisingly resilient during the war with Russia

Tito Boeri, Giacomo Anastasia, and Oleksandr Zholud write for The Conversation on the resilience of the Ukrainian labour asking how, in a wartime economy, works and firms find each other....Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine:

Do people get used to working long hours?

Overemployment - working more hours than desired - affects nearly one-third of European workers, yet its consequences remain understudied. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, 1984-2019, N = 43,570) and...Read more...

Journal article

Large-scale Assessments in Education:

Driven to succeed? Teenagers' achievement motivation, university aspirations, and performance on high-stakes examinations

There is growing interest in how young people's socio-emotional skills, particularly motivation, shape educational outcomes. Yet less is known about how adolescents' general achievement motivation and their specific aspi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Explaining the predictive performance of police in cases of domestic abuse

Police in England and Wales are asked to predict the likelihood of serious recidivism in domestic abuse cases, with little support beyond a flawed questionnaire. To analyze their decisions, we first develop methods to de...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Universities, new tasks, and the rise of services

Structural transformation from manufacturing to services varies sharply across US regions. We document that regions with universities, especially highly ranked research institutions, experience faster growth in high-skil...Read more...

Journal article

Review of International Economics:

Value co-creation and value capture in digital innovation ecosystems: a multiple case study in the agrifood sector

We use a large episode of trade liberalization in Spain to test a rich set of channels linking trade and markups. The effect of reductions in import tariffs on firm-level and aggregate markups is pro-competitive, but the...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

ChatGPT or Zoom - which broke the career ladder?

Entry-level hiring has fallen sharply across white-collar work. An emerging explanation has been that generative AI is to blame. Drawing on their new study of hundreds of millions of hires and job adverts, Peter John Lam...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Firms slice up global production to protect their knowhow

Imitation is a first-order concern for enterprises operating global production processes. Firms routinely source knowledge-intensive inputs from many countries, including those with weak intellectual property laws. This ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Female-targeted hiring subsidies, firm learning, and women's employment

Women often struggle to re-enter employment after career breaks, possibly because employers are uncertain about their productivity. We study whether hiring subsidies help firms overcome this uncertainty and hire from thi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Defense promotion and industrial development

Major economies are rearming, and rearmament is itself industrial policy. I ask whether defense promotion - especially innovation policy - can drive industrial development beyond the defense sector. I synthesize evidence...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is data privacy a losing game? Evidence from Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy

We study the impact of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which requires apps to obtain explicit user permission before cross-app tracking, on the mobile gaming industry. Using SensorTower US data on the top...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational income persistence in the Millennial generation

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

CEP discussion paper

Brief yet effective: group counseling and college access for disadvantaged students

Large socioeconomic gaps in higher-education access and completion persist even among similarly talented students with access to generous funding, pointing to an important role for information frictions and unequal suppo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teachers' leniency: experimental evidence

Two teachers grading the same student can reach very different conclusions? yet little is known about which teacher characteristics drive such disagreement. We investigate this question through a large-scale online exper...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Without radical planning reform, Burnham cannot build the houses he's promising

Governments keep promising to build more houses, and keep failing to do so. Now, Andy Burnham has upped the challenge by promising not just more houses, but specifically more council houses since World War II. Paul Chesh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic effects of trade

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

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

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

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

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China?s world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...Read more...

Blog

VoxTalks:

Tariff Confusion (podcast)

If you run a business that exports to the United States, how big is the tariff you have to pay? In 2025 that question was hard to answer. Between February and December, 53 separate announcements introduced, delayed, rein...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employer market power: models and methods

It is now widely recognized that employers hold some wage-setting power over workers, and several recent reviews cover the resulting surge of research on monopsony. We take a high-level view, introducing the idea of the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The equilibrium impact of credit frictions: evidence from default risk using firm-level data

This paper examines the impact of credit frictions arising from firm-level default risk on aggregate economic performance. We build a micro-to-macro model with heterogeneous firms and sector-specific production functions...Read more...

Journal article

Industrial Relations:

Collective bargaining and monopsony: the regulation of noncompete agreements in France

Can collective bargaining mitigate monopsony power? This paper studies the extent to which collective agreements regulating employee noncompete clauses affect firm-level markdowns in French manufacturing. Using a stagger...Read more...

Blog

LSE Management:

How America out-deindustrialised Europe

Despite the prevailing narrative of Western deindustrialisation as one of a rigid Europe and a dynamic America, Richard Baldwin, Saul Estrin, and Bob Hancke argue that the comparison of the EU with the US turns this narr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Industrial Economics:

Asymmetric pass-through and competition

We study the retail price pass-through of four major tax changes in petroleum products using daily pricing data from gas stations on small Greek islands. We find that (i) the pass-through of the tax hikes is five times h...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The economic dynamics of city structure: evidence from Hiroshima's recovery

We provide new theory and evidence on the resilience of the internal city structure after a large shock by analyzing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Exploiting newly digitized data, we document that the city structure r...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

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

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

CEP occasional paper

CEP wellbeing coefficient database

Wellbeing cost-benefit analysis requires credible estimates of how much specific life circumstances change subjective wellbeing. This paper documents and contextualises a compendium of 123 such estimates, drawn from 19 d...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Can Manchesterism really be a blueprint for national growth?

As Andy Burnham takes over as Prime Minister, Manchesterism is increasingly discussed as a blueprint for the rest of the country. But Aadya Bahl argues that much of the success of Greater Manchester depended on local con...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

UK national productivity trends: getting the data right

We compare standard productivity estimates of UK output per worker derived from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) with newly released estimates based on more reliable "Real Time Information" (RTI) administrative data. LFS-ba...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Place-based industrial policies in the long run

There is growing evidence that place-based industrial policies lead to positive economic effects. This column analyses the 'Million-Rouble Plants' programme of the 1950s when the Soviet Union helped China build state-of-...Read more...

Blog

Bloomberg Trumponomics (podcast):

Are We Being Priced Out of Happiness?

Americans are spending less time with friends, nights out are getting more expensive and even major sporting events are becoming harder to afford. Stephanie Flanders speaks with Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman and econo...Read more...

Blog

LSE British politics:

Burnham's Manchesterism can help universities drive local growth

Andy Burnham recently acknowledged that UK universities are capable of driving innovation and economic growth. But their ability to do so is being undermined by a higher education funding crisis. Manchesterism, with its ...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

Ports, technology and inter-city trade: The economics and geopolitics of evolving maritime transport networks

Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and shipping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granular ...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

Ports, technology and inter-city trade: the economics and geopolitics of evolving maritime transport networks

Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and ship- ping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granula...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

Prevention loses budget battles - wellbeing economics can change the maths

From extreme heat to heavy rains, governments are increasingly faced with the need to be prepared for the impacts of climate change. Christian Krekel and Sara MacLennan outline how wellbeing economics can make a compelli...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

World trade remains dangerously dependent on a handful of shipping lanes

The conflict in Iran has been reignited by disagreements about control of a critical shipping lane. But the Strait of Hormuz is not the only chokepoint making global trade vulnerable. Ferdinand Rauch, Stephan Maurer and ...Read more...

Blog

LSE US Politics and Policy:

Catalytic converter thefts rise and fall with global metal prices

Catalytic convertors reduce the harmful emissions produced by vehicles with combustion engines and contain valuable metals like platinum, In new research, Gerald Foong, Stephen Machin and Matteo Sandi look at the relatio...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

Did Brexit make us better at communicating economics?

The referendum on the UK's membership of the EU was a watershed moment for research communication. Despite a near total academic consensus on the negative economic consequences of a vote to Leave, this message did not de...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Ports, technology and inter-city trade: the economics and geopolitics of evolving maritime transport networks

Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and shipping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granular ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China's world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Input uncertainty and firm performance: evidence from critical minerals

We study the effect of perceived input uncertainty about critical minerals on firm performance, separating second-moment risk from first-moment shocks and general firm-level uncertainty. Using earnings call transcripts m...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Nobel lecture: The economics of creative destruction

The expression "creative destruction" was coined by Joseph Schumpeter to describe the process whereby new innovations displace old technologies. Schumpeter himself would acknowledge a filiation with Karl Marx, and more p...Read more...

Blog

Polytechnique Insights:

Europe is falling behind, can it pick up the pace when it comes to innovation?

Philippe Aghion writes for Polytechnique Insights on how Europe must prepare its own AI strategy if it wishes to make up ground lost to the U.S. in terms of GDP per capita, productivity and disruptive innovations....Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics:

Import liberalization as export destruction? Evidence from the United States

In trade models with scale economies import liberalization reduces exports within industries by shrinking real market potential. We find this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the permanent ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International trade in an uncertain world

We develop a tractable quantitative model of international trade in which agents make bilateral investments in resilience under general equilibrium uncertainty. Under both complete and incomplete financial markets, we sh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tariff confusion

US trade policy in 2025 was unprecedented in the frequency, complexity and volatility of tariff announcements. This paper presents evidence that the resulting policy environment reduced trade flows because of confusion o...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Post-Brexit trade policy hit supply chains and workers

After Brexit, firms in the UK found their supply chains disrupted. Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain and Martina Magli show that subsequent declines in trade led to less employment and lower pay for workers - with firms im...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Youth crime and delinquency in and out of school

Ten years of idiosyncratic variation in school closure dates for all secondary schools in England are combined with administrative records of educational and criminal trajectories linked at the individual level to study ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Brexit was supposed to limit immigration, it did the opposite

Being able to control immigration from the EU became one of the defining issues of the Vote Leave campaign. While Brexit has meant the end of free movement from the EU, immigration to the UK has since risen to record lev...Read more...

CentrePiece article

My must-read paper

Discover Swati Dhingra's recommended reading on trade economics...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Take-away findings from food delivery apps

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

CentrePiece article

Working from home in the public sector

Study finds workers work faster when they work from home...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Remembering our friend and colleague David Metcalf

A widely-admired economist whose work on labour markets led to a number of high-profile roles in public life...Read more...