Results

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

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...

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

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

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...

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...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Managing export complexity: the role of service outsourcing

As manufacturing firms expand globally, business services such as advertising and legal support become essential for entering new markets. Exploiting exogenous demand shocks, we document that French manufacturers increas...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Skills, not scale: GenAI and technology adoption

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

CEP discussion paper

Evading the ban: smuggling, pollution, and the welfare effects of China?s waste import restrictions

While import restrictions are increasingly deployed to achieve non-trade objectives such as environmental protection, they often create distortions and leakage through illicit trade. We examine this trade-off in the cont...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender equality and innovation: evidence from UK companies

We investigate the effect of intra-firm gender disparities on innovation using a unique longitudinal dataset of UK companies from 1996 to 2019. Utilising within-industry and within-firm variation, as well as an instrumen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

CEP discussion paper

Growth insured: export credit insurance and trade

We estimate the causal effect of short-term export credit insurance (ECI) on firm-level exports using administrative data from China?s export credit agency merged with customs and tax records. Exploiting quasi-random var...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology spillovers, diffusion and rivalry in firm networks

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

Journal article

Strategy Science:

Strategic confusopoly: evidence from the UK mobile telecommunications market

Can entire markets strategically confuse consumers to raise market prices? Using a detailed data set covering virtually all mobile phone tariffs and their handsets in the United Kingdom between January 2010 and September...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Economics:

Firm climate investment: a glass half-full

The green transition will require large investments from firms, yet little is known about the scale and drivers of climate-related capital expenditure across the UK economy. To address this gap, we draw on a large, repre...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When do employers share? Rent sharing, monopsony and minimum wages

When firm productivity or product demand rises, workers typically share in the gains through higher wages or expanded employment. We show that for firms under monopsony with a binding minimum wage, this link from firm ga...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Mapping digital businesses with big data: some early findings from the UK

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT industries. Researchers and policymakers thus need a clear picture of digital businesses, but conventional datasets and typologies tend to lag real-world change. We ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Hiroshima: urban resilience after the atomic bomb

Why the city centre re-emerged from destruction....Read more...

Journal article

International Economics:

Reassessing EU comparative advantage: the role of technology

Based on a sufficient statistics approach, we show how the state of technology of European industries relative to the rest of the world can be empirically assessed in a way that is simple in terms of computation, parsimo...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Development Economics:

The firm-pay gender gap and formal sector churn over the life cycle

We find that women sorting into lower paying firms explains nearly half of the gender pay gap in South Africa. Using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal workers, we show sorting varies co...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

Technological change and domestic outsourcing

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered dif...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Monopsony and employer misoptimization explain why wages bunch at round numbers

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks o...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Do larger firms exert more market power? Markups and markdowns along the size distribution

Combining financial statements with firm-level product prices, we find that larger firms exhibit lower markups, although they are overcompensated by substantially higher wage markdowns. We explain our divergence from pri...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

Returns to adult learning

A common starting point in understanding investments in learning is that people participate in education when the life-cycle returns to education outweigh its costs. Since people will reap the higher wages associated wit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating labour market power: the long and short of it

This paper combines two empirical traditions in the study of employer monopsony power. One tradition estimates static firm labour supply elasticities, while the other focuses on labour market flows, estimating separation...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm-level technology adoption in times of crisis

We investigate the diffusion of frontier technologies across German firms before and during the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations behind technology investments, usi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm dynamics and growth with soft budget constraints

We develop a model of endogenous growth and firm dynamics with soft budget constraints, where firms differ in their innovation speed and slower firms need additional financing in order to eventually innovate. As creditor...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Service offshoring and export experience

Service inputs significantly influence export costs and firm internationalisation. A new dataset on French firms? participation in global value chains reveals that experienced exporters are more likely to source services...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics :

The value of managers' export experience: lessons from the Angolan civil war

We investigate how managers help firms grow by entering a new export market. We conduct an event study on the decision to export to Angola using data on Portuguese firms and workers. We evaluate the impact of the presenc...Read more...

Journal article

Demography:

Population growth, immigration, and labor market dynamics

This article provides a first synthesis of population flows and labor market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations. We devise a novel dynamic accounting methodology that integrates population flows from t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Organizational capacity and profit shifting

Good organizational capacity drives productivity and potential taxable profits, but may also enable multinationals (MNEs) to more efficiently re-allocate profits across tax jurisdictions, lowering actual taxable profits....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists,:

Management practices and climate policy in China

We investigate how management quality moderates the impact of carbon pricing on Chinese firms. Based on interviews with managers and lead engineers at manufacturing firms in Hubei and Beijing, we construct a novel index ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The speed of firm response to inflation

Firm inflation expectations are a key driver of future price growth. This column uses a large economy-wide business survey to understand the response of firms to monthly CPI inflation releases in the UK. Firms' CPI infla...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brexit and investment

In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union and growth in UK manufacturing investment ground to a halt. This paper uses administrative trade data to investigate the causal relationship between these events. We expl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Disaster management

Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, yet little is known about the capacity of firms to withstand such disasters and adapt to their increased frequency. We examine this issue using the latest wave of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accounting for the evolution of China's production and trade patterns

This paper studies the evolution of China's production and trade patterns during its integration into the global economy. We document and explain new facts concerning changes in production and exports at the industry and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Leaving the global playing field through optimal non-discriminatory corporate taxes and subsidies

Due to markup distortions, in international trade models with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms the market equilibrium is inefficient unless demand exhibits constant elasticity of substitution. When it doe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why delay? Understanding the construction lag, aka the build out rate

We explore the determinants of the speed of residential development after dwelling construction starts. Using a sample of over 140,000 residential developments in England from 1996 to 2015 and employing an instrumental v...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Using disasters to estimate the impact of uncertainty

Uncertainty rises in recessions and falls in booms. But what is the causal relationship? We construct cross-country panel data on stock market returns to proxy for first- and second-moment shocks and instrument these wit...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Lessons for business support schemes from a large RCT in the UK

Productivity in the UK is stagnant and improving firm performance a key policy objective. Almost a decade ago, the UK government undertook an ambitious randomised control trial - the Growth Vouchers Programme - which pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firms in product space: adoption, growth and competition

Which products are potentially produced together? When demand for a product increases, which firms will supply it? Using multi-product production patterns within and across firms, we recover a continuous cost based dista...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Come together: firm boundaries and delegation

We jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them by confronting an incomplete-contracts model with data on vertical integration and delegation for thousands of firms around the world. In...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy :

Local retail prices, product variety, and neighborhood change

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-ba...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does subsidising business advice improve firm performance? Evidence from a large RCT

We evaluate the impact of the UK's Growth Vouchers Programme, which offered subsidised business advice to 15,207 randomly selected small and medium size enterprises. Using administrative and survey data, we show that the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global managers, local workers: wage setting inside a multinational firm

How are wages set within a multinational firm? Combining cross-country data on wages and labor regulations with personnel records of a large multinational firm, I find that wage setting depends on the rank of the employe...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

Parenthood and academic career trajectories

Women continue to be underrepresented in the field of economics, especially among permanent faculty. As parenthood is an important driver of gender inequality in the labor market, we study the impact of children on the a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Rethinking revealed comparative advantage with micro and macro data

The Balassa's index of revealed comparative advantage does not necessarily reveal Ricardian comparative advantage. We propose an alternative sufficient statistics approach based on a quantitative standard trade model inc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Urban-biased structural change

Using firm-level data from France, we document that the shift of economic activity from manufacturing to services over the last few decades has been urban-biased: structural change has been more pronounced in areas with ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review :

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Regional productivity differences in the UK and France: from the micro to the macro

We propose a new data resource that attempts to overcome limitations of standard firm-level datasets for the UK (like the ARD/ABS) by building on administrative data covering the population of UK firms with at least one ...Read more...

Blog

Liberty Street Economics:

Do Large Firms Generate Positive Productivity Spillovers?

Mary Amiti, Cedric Duprez, Jozef Konings and John Van Reenen investigate whether large firms also generate positive effects. Using firm-to-firm transaction data for an industrialised country, Belgium, they find that larg...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do larger firms exert more market power? Markups and markdowns along the size distribution

Several models posit a positive cross-sectional correlation between markups and firm size, which characterizes misallocation, factor shares, and gains from trade. Accounting for labor market power in markup estimation, w...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Price-setting in a high-inflation environment

Since 2021, inflation rates have increased sharply in many advanced economies. Philip Bunn, Nicholas Bloom, Paul Mizen, Ozgen Ozturk, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov study firm pricing strategies during the recent perio...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish thi...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The local labor market effects of modern manufacturing capital: evidence from France

Using an event study methodology and comprehensive micro data from the French manufacturing sector, we analyze the local labor market effects of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation te...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Sequentially exporting products across countries

Exploiting disaggregated data on French exporters, we show that firms expand their product scope and geographical presence sequentially. This process of internationalization is uneven over time, exhibiting more volatilit...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Global value chains and domestic innovation

This paper explores how changes in both position and participation in Global Value Chain (GVC) networks affect firm innovation. The analysis combines matched patent-firm data for Japan with measures of GVC network centra...Read more...

Journal article

Econometrica:

Dynamic spatial general equilibrium

We incorporate forward-looking capital accumulation into a dynamic discrete choice model of migration. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium; generalize existing dynamic exact-hat algebra techniques to incorporate...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Robot adoption, worker-firm sorting and wage inequality: evidence from administrative panel data

Leveraging the geographic dimension of a large administrative panel on employer-employee contracts, we study the impact of robot adoption on wage inequality through changes in worker-firm assortativity. Using recently de...Read more...

Journal article

Industrial and Corporate Change :

Industry concentration in Europe and North America

This paper presents new evidence on industry concentration at both the country and the world-region levels. It calculates country-level industry concentration measures from the novel data representative of the entire fir...Read more...

Journal article

Quantitative Economics:

Income dynamics in the United Kingdom and the impact of the Covid-19 recession

In this paper, we use an employer-based survey of earnings and hours to set out the key patterns in UK earnings dynamics from 1975 to 2020, with a particular focus on the most recent recession. We demonstrate that (log) ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The comparative advantage of firms

Resource-based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products that use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common-input capabilities, using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sparse production networks

Firm-to-firm connections in domestic and international production networks play a fundamental role in economic outcomes. Firm heterogeneity and the sparse nature of firm-to-firm connections implicitly discipline network ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firms and inequality when unemployment is high

How important are firms for wage inequality in developing countries where structural unemployment is high? Research focused on contexts close to full employment has suggested a substantial role of firms in labor market i...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Firm-destination heterogeneity and the distribution of export intensity

We derive closed-form expressions for the distribution of export intensity when firm-destination-specific revenue shifters are distributed gamma, Frechet and Weibull in a two-country model of trade with isoelastic demand...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics :

The slope of the Phillips Curve: evidence from US States

We estimate the slope of the Phillips curve in the cross section of U.S. states using newly constructed state-level price indices for nontradeable goods back to 1978. Our estimates indicate that the slope of the Phillips...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The origins of firm heterogeneity: a production network approach

We explore firm size heterogeneity in production networks. In comprehensive data for Belgium, firms with more customers have higher total sales but lower sales and lower market shares per customer. Downstream factors, es...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

The twin peaks of the export intensity distribution

Received wisdom suggests that most exporters sell most of their output domestically. We show, however, that the distribution of export intensity varies substantially across countries and is often bimodal, displaying ?twi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing export complexity: The role of service outsourcing

As manufacturing firms expand globally, business services like advertising and legal support become essential for accessing new markets. This paper investigates how firms organize the provision of such market access serv...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Misallocation explains worse management among Mexican firms

The implications of poor management in developing countries are becoming well known, but what drives these differences is less clear. Based on large new surveys in Mexico and the US, this column argues that misallocation...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

Management Science:

Building a productive workforce: the role of structured management practices

In an influential study, Bender et al. [Bender S, Bloom N, Card D, Van Reenen J, Wolter S (2018) Management practices, workforce selection, and productivity. J. Labor Econom. 36(S1):S371-S409] document consistent relatio...Read more...

Journal article

British Journal of Industrial Relations:

Introduction to symposium on the impact of employee influence

The three papers contained in this Symposium are the final products of a lengthy and fruitful research Odyssey. In retrospect, uncharacteristic almost to the point of surreal, the new incoming, post-Brexit referendum, Br...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Covid-19 uncertainty: a tale of two tails

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive spike in uncertainty. This column uses data from panel surveys of US and UK business executives to document how uncertainty over own-firm sales growth rates over the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Population growth, immigration and labour market dynamics

This paper examines the role of population flows on labour market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations in the United Kingdom. Population flows are large, and cyclical, driven first by the maturation of b...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

The donut effect of Covid-19 on cities

Using data from the US Postal Service and Zillow, we quantify the effect of Covid-19 on migration patterns and real estate markets within and across US cities. We find two key results. First, within large US cities, hous...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

This time is not so different: income dynamics during the Covid-19 recession

We use a UK employer-employee administrative earnings dataset to investigate the response of earnings and hours to business cycles. Exploiting our long panel of data from 1975 to 2020 we find wide heterogeneity in the ex...Read more...

Journal article

German Economic Review:

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

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

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic spatial general equilibrium

We develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model with forward-looking investment and migration decisions. We characterize analytically the transition path of the spatial distribution of economic activity in respons...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technological change and domestic outsourcing

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered dif...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Education and management practices

The empirical management literature has found that the education of both managers and the workforce more generally appears to be an important driver of better management practices. This article sets out how such relation...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Service offshoring and export experience

Service inputs are a key component of the costs of exporting, and contribute to explain the process of internationalization of firms. A new dataset on the participation of French firms in global value chains reveals that...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sequential exporting across countries and products

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a c...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Prices and inflation in a pandemic - a micro data approach

The Covid-19 lockdowns and recession are the most exceptional economic events in living memory and will impact the economy for years to come. One vital channel is via price changes. Price rises and cuts alter real wages,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data where there is a sharp ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why have house prices risen so much more than rents in superstar cities?

In most countries ? particularly in supply constrained superstar cities ? house prices have risen much more strongly than rents over the last two decades. We provide an explanation that does not rely on falling interest ...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

Journal of Political Economy:

Productivity and organization in portuguese firms

Using employer-employee matched and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of productivity to firm reorganizations as measured by changes in the number of managemen...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization:

In-house and arms length: productivity heterogeneity and variation in organizational form

This paper analyzes firm boundaries in the US hotel industry. Hotel properties of a given brand are often managed either by a chain employee or by a franchisee. We document that brand properties with the lowest and the h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Growing like China: firm performance and global production line position

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to e...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Trade liberalization, input intermediaries and firm productivity: evidence from China

We investigate theoretically and empirically the role of wholesalers in mediating the productivity effects of trade liberalization. Intermediaries provide indirect access to foreign produced inputs. The productivity effe...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Preserving job matches during the Covid-19 pandemic: firm-level evidence on the role of government aid

We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and government policies on firms? aid takeup, layoff and furlough decisions. We collect new survey data for 10,642 small, medium and large Danish firms, and match to governm...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intellectual property and the organization of the global value chain

This paper introduces the concept of intangible assets in a property rights model of sequential supply chains. Firms transmit knowledge to their suppliers to facilitate input customization. Yet, to avoid knowledge dissip...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Gender diversity in firms

This paper explores the recent efforts by the corporate world and public policy to increase the number of women in leadership positions in the workplace. We review and empirically evaluate the `business case? for gender ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade liberalization, input intermediaries and firm productivity: evidence from China

We investigate theoretically and empirically the role of wholesalers in mediating the productivity effects of trade liberalization. Intermediaries provide indirect access to foreign produced inputs. The productivity effe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industry concentration in Europe and North America

This report presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and bus...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Geography, competition, and optimal multilateral trade policy

How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The best versus the rest: divergence across firms during the global productivity slowdown

We document that labor productivity of the globally most productive firms ? the ?frontier? ? has diverged from all other firms ? the ?rest? ? throughout the 2000s. This divergence remains after controlling for capital in...Read more...