Results

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Fiscal and education spillovers from charter school expansion

Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from noncharter schools? We provide new evidence on the fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for noncharter students in Massachusetts, which...Read more...

Blog

Bruegel:

Pitfalls to avoid as the EU ramps up defence investment

The European Union's push to rearm in the face of growing external threats and the increasing disengagement of the United States has, so far, been primarily a push to spend more on defence and to find ways to facilitate ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Design-based fiscal stimulus transfers: Evidence and macro implications

In recent years, and during Covid-19 in particular, many countries have experimented with innovative approaches to fiscal stimulus. This column reports on an experiment in France in which individuals were given a debit c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dissecting the sinews of power: international trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal-military state, 1689-1823

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of dome...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Budget 2020: a bold response to coronavirus, but more must be done if it becomes widespread in the UK

While the 2020 Budget offers an overall adequate response to the challenges currently posed by coronavirus, there are three issues that need to be addressed further, especially as the outbreak becomes more widespread, wr...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Strategic inattention, delegation and endogenous market structure

We model an industry in which a discrete number of firms choose the output of their differentiated products, deciding whether or not to consider the impact of their decisions on aggregate output. The firm's choice of ign...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

Financing local police spending in England and Wales: fiscal federalism in practice

Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have been able to raise revenues locally to supplement grants from central government. We analyse the variation across police force areas in locally raised police revenues o...Read more...

Journal article

China and World Economy:

Fiscal subsidy policy on home appliances: its effects on domestic consumption and exports in China

This paper evaluates the effects of the Home Appliances Going to the Countryside (HAGC) policy, a fiscal subsidy program implemented in China to boost private consumption of home appliances in rural areas from 2007 to 20...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Task specialization in US cities from 1880 to 2000

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using over 3,000 verbs from more than 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro dat...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 discussion paper

Fiscal and education spillovers from charter school expansion

The fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for non-charter students are central issues in the debate over charter schools. Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter sc...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Estimating strategic models of international treaty formation

This article develops an empirical framework for analysing the timing of international treaties. A treaty is modelled as a dynamic game among governments that decide on participation in every period. The net benefit of t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Task Specialization in U.S. Cities from 1880-2000

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro-data from t...Read more...

CEP US election analysis

Inequality and opportunity: the return of a neglected debate

During this election period many Americans are feeling angry towards the very rich, especially those working in the financial sector, who helped cause the Great Recession and yet were bailed out by the government. Increa...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...

CentrePiece article

Growth and productivity: UK economic performance since 1997

A common view is that the performance of the UK economy between 1997 and 2010 under Labour was very weak and that the current economic problems are a consequence of poor policies in this period. In this report, we analys...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Household Effects of Government Spending

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fiscal Multipliers over the Business Cycle

This paper illustrates why fiscal policy becomes more effective as unemployment rises in recessions. The theory is based on the equilibrium unemployment model of Michaillat (forthcoming), in which jobs are rationed in re...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Tax Competition Among Local Governments: Evidence from a Property Tax Reform in Finland

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the ...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 discussion paper

Do Oil Windfalls Improve Living Standards? Evidence from Brazil

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can Family-Support Policies Help Explain Differences in Working Hours Across Countries?

It has been suggested in the literature that taxes and subsidies play an important role in explaining the differences in working hours across countries. In this paper I test whether public programmes for family support p...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Decentralization Matter for Regional Disparities? A Cross-Country Analysis

This paper looks at the relationship between fiscal and political decentralization and the evolution of regional inequalities in a panel of 26 countries ? 19 developed and 7 developing ? for the period between 1990 and 2...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the International Dimension of Fiscal Policy

This paper analyses the international dimension of fiscal policy using a small open economy framework in which the government finances its spending by levying distortionary taxation and issuing non-state-contingent debt....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Seigniorage

In this paper I analyse four different but related concepts, each of which highlights some aspect of the way in which the state acquires command over real resources through its ability to issue fiat money. They are (1) s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Inflation, Inequality and Social Conflict

This paper presents a political economy model of inflation as a result of social conflict. Agents are heterogeneous in terms of income. Agents? income levels determine their ability to hedge against the effects of inflat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Fallacy of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

It is not common for an entire scholarly literature to be based on a fallacy, that is, 'on faulty reasoning; misleading or unsound argument'. The 'fiscal theory of the price level', recently re-developed by Woodford,...Read more...