Results

Blog

Vox EU:

Closing the health gap: How chronic illness drives health inequality early on

Though health disparities have long been the subject of research and debate, life expectancy gaps between rich and poor remain striking, even in countries with universal access to healthcare. This column analyses the roo...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Economic growth requires breaking the cycle of poor work and ill health

Work is an important part of our lives and crucial to wellbeing. But "good" work that offers security and autonomy is unevenly distributed. Workers in lower-paid jobs often find themselves trapped in "bad" jobs, characte...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Education makes women, not men, more likely to have children

Given the wide-ranging consequences of declining fertility rates, academics and policymakers around the world are increasingly interested in understanding what influences men's and women's decision to start a family. Han...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Global environmental cooperation and innovation

In the ongoing debate on climate change, one of the most pressing challenges is fostering effective international cooperation. This column examines the success of the 1987 'Montreal Protocol' in phasing out harmful chlor...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Mental health support teams in schools: Evidence and assumptions

In this paper we examine the cost-effectiveness of providing NICE recommended psychological therapy to young people. For each type of mental health problem we show: (i) the assumptions used to derive the impact of treati...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Mental health and employment

In this report we evaluate the benefits and costs of providing NICE recommended treatment for addiction or severe mental health problems over a two-year time horizon for one individual. We separately investigate addictio...Read more...

CEP report

Value for money: How to improve wellbeing and reduce misery

The government spends billions on our behalf. How do we want this money to be spent? This report reviews a range of policies and asks the fundamental question which should be asked of every policy: Does it deliver value ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating the impact of export finance support on firm-level export performance: Evidence from Pakistan

This paper evaluates the impact of two large export finance support schemes on firm-level export performance. The Export Finance Scheme (EFS) and the Long-Term Finance Facility for Plant & Machinery (LTFF), provide loans...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Elite universities and the intergenerational transmission of human and social capital

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, ...Read more...

Blog

Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment:

Harnessing the UK's strengths for green growth

Esin Serin and Pia Andres set out evidence on the UK's sectoral and technological strengths to assist policymakers as they consider how to allocate support across the economy in a way that maximises green growth opportun...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When trade drives markup divergence: An application to auto markets

When firms sell in multiple markets, estimates of markups from the demand-side will generally diverge from estimates based on the supply-side (e.g. via production functions). The empirical examination of the importance o...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Open Economics:

Labour market inequality

Wage and earnings inequality has been on the rise in the United Kingdom (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 o...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Further and higher education

There are not enough graduates for sectors in which the UK has a comparative advantage and there are too few people educated to sub-degree level compared to other countries....Read more...

CEP election analysis

Schools

Schools in England, and the UK as a whole, need greater investment. Failure to do so puts economic growth in jeopardy as well as worsening social mobility....Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers: Forthcoming

Trends in effort at work in the UK

This article links detailed 24-h diary surveys in the UK for the last four decades, to provide evidence of an increase in work effort in three specific dimensions: timing, nature, and composition. We rule out certain pro...Read more...

CentrePiece article

in brief... Why representation in economics matters

To inspire the next generation of black economists, how important is it for them to see people like themselves working in the profession? Felicia Odamtten, an economist at the Resolution Foundation and founder of The Bla...Read more...

CentrePiece article

A generation scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic

The impact of the pandemic on education means that pupils in England are on course for lower GCSE grades well into the 2030s. Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite and Stephen Machin say that the school system ...Read more...

Blog

Imperial College Business School:

Do carbon markets work?

Ever since the EU created its market-based carbon policy, governments and businesses have been keen to see an impact. But analysing how effective policies can be on a noisy economic and global stage is complex - and hard...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy: Forthcoming

Affective paternalism

Many decisions are curated, incentivised or nudged by a third party. Despite this, only a handful of studies have looked at paternalistic decision-makers and the psychological processes by which they arrive at their deci...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics:

Technology Transfer in Global Value Chains

Global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly exclud...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...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Taking Back Control? Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Retirement on Locus of Control

We use Australian panel data to examine the impact of retirement on individual locus of control, a socio-emotional skill with substantial explanatory power for a broad range of life outcomes. Exploiting the eligibility a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The increasing complexity of digitalisation may hurt manual workers' health

Some of the effects of workplace digitalisation are well studied, such as changes in workers' wages and increased economic inequality. But how does technological progress affect workers' health? Melanie Arntz, Sebastian ...Read more...

External publication

A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era

We present for the first time a model of children's evolving socio-emotional and cognitive skills to assess how the educational and lifetime prospects of children of different ages, genders and socio-economic backgrounds...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

A class apart: prime ministers' origins profoundly impact their political worldviews

The background of our Prime Ministers hugely influences the judgements they make. Yet our leaders are drawn from an astonishingly narrow slice of society: every PM who attended an English university since WW2 went to Oxf...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Intergenerational income mobility in France: A comparative and geographic analysis

The question of the extent to which individuals' incomes are related to those of their parents has seen renewed interest as rising income inequality raises concerns about equality of opportunity. Gustave Kenedi and Louis...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

When Tariffs Disrupt Global Supply Chains

We study unanticipated tariffs in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms conduct costly searches and negotiate with potential suppliers that pass a reservation level of match productivity. Global supply ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

The Employment and Distributional Impacts of Nationwide Minimum Wage Changes

We estimate the effect of the introduction of the UK’s National Living Wage in 2016, and increases in it up to 2019, using a new empirical method. We apply a bunching approach to a setting with no geographical variation ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Measuring Absolute Income Mobility: Lessons from North America and Europe

We use linked parent-child administrative data for five countries in North America and Europe, as well as detailed survey data for two more, to investigate methodological challenges in the estimation of absolute income m...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association :

Formation of College Plans: Expected Returns, Preferences and Adjustment Process

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study the formation, and updating, of educational plans, and to examine how these plans ultimately impact later educational attainment. Using novel, longitudinal, microdata on cohort...Read more...

Blog

LSE EUROPP:

Online tutoring can transform education for disadvantaged students

Online tutoring programmes have emerged as an effective strategy for narrowing the educational gaps that were exacerbated by the pandemic. Claudia Hupkau, Lucas Gortazar and Antonio Roldan-Mones outline how an eight-week...Read more...

Journal article

:

Labor Unions and the Electoral Consequences of Trade Liberalization

We show that the Brazilian trade liberalization in the early 1990s led to a permanent relative decline in the vote share of left-wing presidential candidates in the regions more affected by the tariff cuts. This happened...Read more...

Journal article

Research Handbook on Inequalities and Work:

Women’s representation and the gender pay gap: rank, institutional research intensity and ethnicity in UK business schools

We employ a multi-faceted framework to explore the importance of women’s representation to the gender pay gap (GPG) in all UK business schools to analyse an authoritative and complete administrative sample from the Highe...Read more...

Submission to a parliamentary inquiry and government consultation

Business and Trade Committee

Has the UK lost its competitive edge in the global economy? What advantages does it possess, and how can these be exploited for economic growth? The Business and Trade Committee considers these questions as it continues ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are we yet sick of new technologies? The unequal health effects of digitalization

This study quantifies the relationship between workplace digitalization, i.e., the increasing use of frontier technologies, and workers' health outcomes using novel and representative German linked employer-employee data...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...

CEP discussion paper

Talking therapy: Impacts of a nationwide mental health service in England

Common mental health problems impose significant costs on individuals and societies, yet healthcare systems often overlook them. We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a pioneering, nationwide menta...Read more...

Blog

Wonkhe:

The spiralling costs of higher education are hitting stay at home students harder

Commuter students face financial struggle and a growing sense of isolation from campus. Lee Elliot Major introduces the findings of a new student money and wellbeing survey....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Do publicly funded autonomous schools improve education systems in the world?

In recent decades, many countries have established autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools. Natalie Irmert, Jan Bietenbeck, Linn Mattisson and Felix We...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

How Polarised are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground-Up

We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Ending stagnation

What can be done to address Britain’s relative economic decline over the past decade and a half? The final report of the Economy 2030 Inquiry presents an ambitious strategy for reversing decades of under-investment, by t...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Human Behaviour:

Consumption responses to an unconditional child allowance in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic put families in the United States under financial stress. The federal government's largest response in 2021 was the American Rescue Plan Act, which temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in...Read more...

Journal article

Advances in Health Care Management:

Safe Surgery Checklist Implementation: Associations of Management Practice and Safety Culture Change

Designing and developing safe systems has been a persistent challenge in health care, and in surgical settings in particular. In efforts to promote safety, safety culture, i.e., shared values regarding safety management,...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics: Forthcoming

The causal effect of a health treatment on beliefs, stated preferences and memories

The paper estimates the causal effect of a health treatment on patients’ beliefs, preferences and memories about the treatment. It exploits a natural experiment which occurred in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 va...Read more...

CEP Insights

Insights: condensed

The Insights series is an introduction to the work of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). Each Insight highlights the contribution of CEP researchers to both academic understanding and policymaking in one area of ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization:

Does growing up in economic hard times increase compassion? The case of attitudes towards immigration

There is some evidence that people who grew up in economic hard times more strongly favor government redistribution and are more compassionate towards the poor. We investigate how inclusive this increase in compassion is...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...

Blog

Higher Education Policy Institute:

Confronting higher education's class divide

Lee Elliot Major explains why developing an equity approach in higher education is the only way we will ever level the learning playing field - and lays out three simple steps we can take to achieve this....Read more...

Journal article

PLOS ONE :

Access to digital finance: Equity crowdfunding across countries and platforms

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding ...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics: Forthcoming

Social restrictions, leisure and well-being

A wide-ranging public debate surrounds how pandemic lockdown measures differentially impacted individuals and which precise mechanisms – whether financial-, health-, or policy-driven – predominate in determining these ef...Read more...

External publication

Ending stagnation

The UK has great strengths, but is a decade and a half into a period of stagnation. The toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was straining the living standards of low- and middle-income Britain well befor...Read more...

Journal article

British Education Research Journal:

The path increasingly travelled: Vocational entry qualifications, socioeconomic status and university outcomes

Many countries have introduced flexibility in their admissions equivalents for tertiary education, allowing students to apply with vocational rather than academic qualifications at upper secondary level. However, entrant...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Immigration, Female Labour Supply and Local Cultural Norms

We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high ra...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics: Forthcoming

The labour market returns to sleep

Despite the growing prevalence of insufficient sleep among individuals, we still know little about the labour market return to sleep. To address this gap, we use longitudinal data from Germany and leverage exogenous fluc...Read more...

Blog

South-West Social Mobility Commission's Substack:

Fixing a broken tongue

Lee Elliot Major explains why the language we use in education is important to challenge the divides that scar the education system....Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Unravelling the complexities of sanctions

Sanctions have become a linchpin of foreign policy. But as they have grown more complex, understanding their true impact on targeted economies has become increasingly difficult, and evidence of their firm-level effects i...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents

Growth has fallen in the U.S. amid a rise in firm concentration. Market share has shifted to low labour share firms, while within-firm labour shares have actually risen. We propose a theory linking these trends in which ...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...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Youth custody: who ends up there and how does it affect their later lives?

There are severe long-term consequences for young people in the UK who spend time in youth custody, the majority of whom are boys. Those with very low grades, in special education facilities and with additional education...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Commuting for crime

People care about crime, with the spatial distribution of both actual and perceived crime affecting the amenities from living in different areas and residential decisions. The literature finds that crime tends to happen ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... What girls study influences their offspring's health at birth

Educational reform can have a powerful impact on people's health with benefits for the next generation. Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz, Cristina Borra and Almudena Sevilla show how....Read more...

CentrePiece article

The rising tide of school absences in the post-pandemic era

New research reveals that school attendance in the UK is still well below the pre-pandemic norm. Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite and Lee Elliot Major outline the scale of continued absenteeism among pupils across the count...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do wind turbines have adverse health impacts

While wind power is considered key in the transition towards net zero, there are concerns about adverse health impacts on nearby residents. Based on precise geographical coordinates, we link a representative longitudinal...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The Evolution of Work from Home

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20–64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the bi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

Long Social Distancing

Many Americans continued some forms of social distancing after the pandemic. This phenomenon is stronger among older persons, less educated individuals, and those who interact daily with persons at high risk from infecti...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

Explaining the Mathematics Gender Gap: The Role of Stereotypes

Descriptive stereotypes such as “girls are not good at mathematics” or prescriptive stereotypes, that is, fixed views about women’s societal roles, can explain the persistent gender gap in mathematics. Stereotypes lower ...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Policy:

Big oil and the energy transition: Evidence from M&A

International Oil Companies (IOCs) represent a significant source of capital and expertise that could be deployed to contribute to the investment required to achieve the energy transition to a low carbon future. This pap...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Understanding supply and demand

Helene Donnat explains what supply and demand is and why policymakers need to consider it to design effective policies....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics: Forthcoming

Estimating students' valuation for college experiences

Quantifying the consumption value of college - the utility students derive from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities - has been challenging. We leverage the COVID-19 shock to elicit students' intended li...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

The Economic Journal:

Individual consequences of occupational decline

We assess the career earnings losses that individual Swedish workers suffered when their occupations' employment declined. High-quality data allow us to overcome sorting into declining occupations on various attributes, ...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...

Blog

FE News:

The childcare revolution: a new opportunity for parental partnerships in child learning

Lee Elliot Major discusses how teacher-parent partnerships can help make the UK's childcare system more effective and provides three policy recommendations the government can implement....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are the upwardly mobile more left-wing?

It is well-known that the wealthier are more likely to have Right-leaning political preferences. We here in addition consider the role of the individual's starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The rising tide of school absences in the post-pandemic era

While many presumed school attendance levels would recover rapidly from the impact of the pandemic, new research reveals the scale of continued absenteeism among school pupils across the country. Andrew Eyles, Esme Lilly...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Thinking through social infrastructure wider outcomes

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino discusses the indirect effects of social infrastructure on communities, as part of the What works Centre for Local Economic Growth's 'thinking through series' which focuses on how local policymakers...Read more...

Blog

LSE EUROPP:

What girls study at school affects how healthy their babies will be later in life

Education plays a crucial role in shaping the future of individuals and societies. Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz, Cristina Borra and Almudena Sevilla present findings from research on the long-term health effects of a comprehensive ...Read more...

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...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Which educational policies are most effective for equalising opportunities?

Against a backdrop of poor productivity growth, severe skill shortages and increasing educational inequalities in the UK since the pandemic, investment in education and skills is essential. It requires policies that span...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Mapping changes in educational achievement across England

As part of the LSE Festival 2023, the Mapping People and Change exhibition visualises data through maps on various socio-economic issues, providing insights into the impact of a rapidly changing world on people and commu...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...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics: Forthcoming

The long shadow of local decline: birthplace economic adversity and long-term individual outcomes in the UK

Does growing up in a high-economic adversity area matter for individual economic, cultural, and political views? Despite a significant focus upon the effect of birthplace on economic outcomes, there is less evidence on h...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources :

Where versus what: college value-added and returns to field of study in further education

We use administrative records on educational and labor market trajectories to estimate the value-added of English further education colleges in terms of educational and labor market outcomes and earnings returns to diffe...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

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...

CEP discussion paper

Long social distancing

Many working-age Americans say they will continue some forms of social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. We uncover this long social distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Atti...Read more...

Book

Free and Equal
What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

Imagine: you are designing a society, but you don't know who you'll be within it - rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like? This is the revolutionary thought experiment...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...

CEP discussion paper

The causal impact of maternal educational curricula on infant health at birth

We provide the first causal evidence of the returns to maternal educational curricula on offspring's health at birth. Educational programs that aim to deliver more general knowledge may potentially improve women's earnin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who stands on the shoulders of Chinese (scientific) giants? Evidence from chemistry

In recent decades, Chinese researchers have become preeminent contributors to the scientific enterprise, as reflected by the number of publications originating from Chinese research institutions. China's rise in science ...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. We first investigate attitudes about citizen complaints using a...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...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management : Forthcoming

Dirty density: air quality and the density of American cities

We study the effect of urban density on the exposure of city dwellers to air pollution using data from the United States urban system. Exploiting geological features to instrument for density, we find an economically and...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

The recent evolution of apprenticeships

The quality of apprenticeships in England has improved in recent years, but take-up has dropped. Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura show how these changes mean that those from disadvantaged neighbourho...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Commute and thrive

The advent of commuting in 1930s London opened up opportunities to working-class people. Andrew Seltzer and Jonathan Wadsworth show how public transport boosts the labour market....Read more...

Journal article

International Economic Review:

2022 Klein Lecture - Parental education and invention: the Finnish enigma

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the United States but also in Finland, which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45 M Finnish individu...Read more...

Blog

LSE American Politics and Policy:

For the US to again become the "Land of Opportunity" we need a better understanding of how geography and industrial change affects incomes

Kohei Takeda unpacks the relationship between declining manufacturing in parts of the US - which are often termed the 'Rust Belt' - and workers' income mobility....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization : Forthcoming

Who promotes gender-sensitive policies?

We study whether female-headed local governments in Spain are more likely to engage in gender sensitive policies such as long-term care support, pre-schooling, or work and family-life balancing services. Using a fuzzy re...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy: Forthcoming

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

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Globalization, Trade Imbalances, and Labor Market Adjustment

We argue that modeling trade imbalances is crucial for understanding transitional dynamics in response to globalization shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multicountry, multisector model of trade with t...Read more...

Chapter

Educational inequality

in Handbook of the economics of education

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socioeconomi...Read more...

Journal article

Scandinavian Journal of Economics: Forthcoming

Where is the land of hope and glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

This paper presents a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata focusing on occupation, home ownership, and education. Four main results ...Read more...

Journal article

NEJM Catalyst:

The role of state policy in fostering health information exchange in the United States.

It is widely agreed that health information sharing holds enormous potential to improve health care productivity. Although the adoption of electronic health records in the United States over the past 15 years has been im...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Unequal education and the 'Great Gatsby Curve'

In modern economies, people's livelihoods are based in large part on skills acquired through education. Unequal education therefore drives both inequality in the labour market and low social mobility across generations. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Defying distance? The provision of services in the digital age

Digital platforms are transforming services by making the physical distance between provider and user less relevant. I quantify the potential gains this flexibility offers in the context of digital primary care in Sweden...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

There's a view out there - call it the "superhero" theory of leadership - in which the individual vision, charisma, and brilliance of a CEO makes or breaks a company. That view is dangerous - not so much because CEOs don...Read more...

Chapter

Housing policy and affordable housing

in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities throughout the world. The main underlying cause for the "affordability crisis," which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who's got the power? Wage determination and its resilience in the Great Recession

Whereas wage inequality has risen markedly in most OECD countries in recent decades, it has fallen in several Southern European economies. To shed light on this phenomenon, we embed sectoral bargaining, which is common i...Read more...

Journal article

NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery:

How health care professionals view their organizations' governance and decision-making.

A survey of the NEJM Catalyst Insights Council finds that health care organizations' strategic priorities have held steady - with even more emphasis on financial returns. Now including global data....Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine: Forthcoming

The impact of Covid-19 lockdown stringency on loneliness in five European countries

The coronavirus pandemic has forced governments to implement a variety of different dynamic lockdown-stringency strategies in the last two years. Extensive lockdown periods could have potential unin- tended consequences ...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 Business Review:

Nothing is booming in Britain, except uncertainty. This is not the time to cut public investment in research

Britain has suffered from a turbulent policy environment for a while. Following chancellor Jeremy Hunt's reversal of nearly all of the mini-budget tax measures and reigned in energy support, difficult spending cuts are c...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The impact of school closures on educational inequality

Nearly all schools closed at some point during the Covid-19 pandemic. Reviewing the international evidence to date on the impact of these closures, Jo Blanden, Matthias Doepke and Jan Stuhler warn that they will substant...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

Policies for affordable housing: options and obstacles

The crisis of housing affordability has been mounting for decades, driven by growing demand for properties in desirable areas where supply is limited. Numerous policies have been enacted across countries, but many are in...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...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Rising school absences: the post pandemic education divide

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the equalising power of schooling. Over 28% of primary and 40% of secondary school pupils who qualified for free school meals were persistently absent during the 2021/22 autumn term....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Charity in the time of austerity: in search of the 'Big Society'

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...

Journal article

Psychological Science:

Feeling good is feeling better

Can people remember their past happiness? We analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany spanning from the 1970s until the present, in which more than 60,0...Read more...

Blog

UK in a changing Europe:

The Johnson legacy: education

Andrew Eyles explains that while the government's goals in education policy have been ambitious and are to be applauded, the policies in place fall short of the targets set out as part of the broader levelling up agenda....Read more...

External publication

Education Inequalities

Education is one of the most important predictors of people's life chances. Better-educated people are more likely to be in work and tend to earn more, and the influence of education does not stop there. Education shapes...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal :

On Target? Sanctions and the interests of elite policy makers in Iran

How successful are sanctions at targeting the economic interests of political elites in affected countries? We study the case of Iran, using information on the stock exchange-listed assets of two specific political entit...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Household inequality and remittances in rural Thailand: a life-cycle perspective

This article studies the dynamics of income inequality among a panel of rural households in Thailand. In contrast to the many cross-section studies of income inequality, the article exploits a long panel data set to exam...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Social push and the direction of innovation

Innovators are intrinsically-motivated individuals who use ideas to create new goods and services. This raises the possibility that their social backgrounds may affect the direction of their innovative activity. Consiste...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...

Journal article

Nature Communications: Forthcoming

The effect of Covid certificates on vaccine uptake, health outcomes, and the economy

In the COVID-19 pandemic many countries required COVID certificates, proving vaccination, recovery, or a recent negative test, to access public and private venues. We estimate their effect on vaccine uptake for France, G...Read more...

Blog

VoxTalks Economics:

Levelling up Europe's left-behind places (podcast)

Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Inequality isn't just between individuals, but between regions too. Henry Overman explains to Tim Phillips why these disparities exist, why they are so persistent, and whether ...Read more...

Journal article

82nd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management:

Efficient Industrial Policy for Innovation: Standing on the Shoulders of Hidden Giants

Knowledge spillovers drive a wedge between private and social returns to R&D. Efficient innovation policy assigns subsidies to fields where spillovers are relatively important. We develop new measures for the private and...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What would it take to level up the UK?

The government's levelling up agenda seeks to reduce disparities across the UK. Policies to boost economic performance will need to attract workers and firms away from London and the South East and improve opportunities ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accidents will happen: (de)regulation of health and safety legislation, workplace accidents and self employment

In 2015, the UK government exempted "low-risk" self-employed workers from legislation on workplace safety. This reversed a move two decades earlier that incorporated the self-employed more fully into the same regulatory ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Social mobility in the time of Covid-19

Young people, especially those from poorer households, have been hard hit by the economic impact of Covid-19. Andrew Eyles assesses the extent of the shock and what it means for social mobility - the extent to which indi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Young people's university plans: evidence from German reunification

Around a decade after Germany's reunification, a long-standing educational gap between the east and west of the country - completion of the certificate needed to enter university - had closed. Ghazala Azmat and Katja Kau...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The economics of levelling up

There is an economic tension at the heart of the government’s plans for 'levelling up' the UK, according to CEP's research director Henry Overman. He argues that getting serious about helping people to access good job op...Read more...

Blog

The Sutton Trust:

Gloomy prospects for social mobility in the pandemic era

Lee Elliot Major and Andrew Eyles explain how a gap in missed education between richer and poorer children was exacerbated by stark home learning divides and the likely consequences for social mobility....Read more...

External publication

Social mobility: past, present and future

Andrew Eyles, Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin forecast that relative income mobility levels in the UK could fall by as much as 12%, driven by learning loss in schools....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 Europp:

Evidence from Greece: the potential pitfalls of using education as a welfare policy instrument

Policymakers frequently use education as a welfare policy instrument. But can these policies have unintended consequences? Christos Genakos and Eleni Kyrkopoulou present findings from a case study in Greece where a socia...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Housing policy and affordable housing

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities around the world. The main underlying cause for the 'affordability crisis', which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of stro...Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine: Forthcoming

"Better the devil you know": Are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?

Most people want to be both happy and healthy. But which matters most when there is a trade-off between them? This paper addresses this question by asking 4000 members of the UK and US public to make various choices betw...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Recidivism and neighbourhood institutions

Between 30% and 50% of individuals sentenced to prison are re-incarcerated in the two years after their release. Andres Barrios-Fernandez and Jorge Garcia-Hombrados examine links between church openings in Chile and re-i...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

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

Journal of Population Economics:

In medio stat victus: labor demand effects of an increase in the retirement age

After falling for four decades, statutory retirement ages are increasing in most OECD countries. The labor market adjustment to these reforms has not yet been thoroughly investigated by the literature. We draw on a major...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...

Chapter

The backlash of globalization

in Handbook of International Economics

We review the literature on the globalization backlash, seen as the political shift of voters and parties in a protectionist and isolationist direction, with substantive implications on governments' leaning and enacted p...Read more...

Blog

Africa at LSE:

How multinationals exploited a health crisis to accelerate deforestation in Liberia

The way multinational enterprises conduct themselves during periods of crisis, such as an epidemic, is of key importance in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. A health crisis may alter the short-run incentives of some multi...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science: Forthcoming

Vertical integration and foreclosure: evidence from production network data

This paper studies the prevalence of potential anticompetitive effects of vertical mergers using a novel data set on U.S. and international buyer-seller relationships and across a large range of industries. We find that ...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...

External publication

Innovation and inequalities

Innovation can affect inequalities in many ways - increasing some inequalities and decreasing others. An innovation can introduce a new good, improve the quality of existing goods, or lead to new ways of doing things. It...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy :

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic History:

The long shadow of slavery: The persistence of slave owners in southern lawmaking

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The effects of college capital projects on student outcomes

What can the UK government expect to get for its £1.5 billion investment in further education colleges? Claudia Hupkau and Sandra McNally investigate the benefits of capital projects in the sector and find that they help...Read more...

CentrePiece article

What have the 2021 Nobel laureates done for us?

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. Jörn-Steffen Pischke explains how the use of natural experiments in empirical economics, work in which they were pione...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Inequalities in student to degree match

Researchers find students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be undermatched to their degree courses both academically and in terms of earnings potential. Women are more likely than men to be underma...Read more...

External publication

Spatial disparities across labour markets

Spatial inequalities in the UK are profound and persistent. In 2019, average wages in London were 60% higher than those in Scarborough and Grimsby. Employment rates ranged from 66% in Skegness and Louth to 90% in Harroga...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Why wellbeing should be the goal of policy

Wherever there is a fixed budget constraint, money should be allocated to policies which give the greatest increase in wellbeing per pound of expenditure, argues Richard Layard. Even policy-makers unmoved by wellbeing as...Read more...

Journal article

Perspectives on Psychological Science: Forthcoming

Mental health during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic: a review and recommendations for moving forward

COVID-19 has infected millions of people and upended the lives of most humans on the planet. Researchers from across the psychological sciences have sought to document and investigate the impact of COVID-19 in myriad way...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Have you quit your New Year's resolution by Quitter's Day?

Many people make New Year's resolutions, but by mid-January most resolutions will have been left aside. Workouts are skipped in favour of Netflix. Salads are shunned in favour of pasta. And across the UK Dry January is r...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Prosociality and the pandemic: adolescents from poorer backgrounds suffered more

Camille Terrier, Daniel L Chen and Matthias Sutter look at how Covid-19 infections affected adolescents' prosociality, an essential non-cognitive skill. The prosociality gap between students with high and low socio-econo...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Covid has hit social mobility in the UK, and young people's prospects are shrinking

The economic impact of Covid has hit young people, and especially poorer young people, harder than others. Andrew Eyles assesses the extent of the shock and what it means for social mobility, which was already in decline...Read more...

Journal article

Health and Place:

Income-related health inequality in urban China (1991-2015): the role of homeownership and housing conditions

Unprecedented economic growth has been experienced over the several decades worldwide, but such rapid economic growth wasn't accompanied by equally-substantial improvement in health, especially health inequalities betwee...Read more...

External publication

Social mobility in the time of Covid: assessing the social mobility implications of Covid-19

Covid-19 has had a profound impact on the economic prospects of young people. This briefing note, which forms part of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, documents the unequal impact of economic shocks on the young and assesses wh...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Health Planning and Management: Forthcoming

Medical disputes and patient satisfaction in China: How does hospital management matter?

Objective: Satisfaction with healthcare may be captured by surveys of patients and staff, or in extreme cases, the number and severity of medical disputes. This study tries to investigate the relationship between satisfa...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...

Journal article

Wirtschaftsdienst:

Natural Experiments in Labor Economics and Beyond: The 2021 Nobel laureates David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens

This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics honoured David Card of the University of California, Berkeley “for his empirical contributions to labour economics”, and Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of Stanford University ...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...

Blog

CVER Blog:

The effects of college capital projects on student outcomes

In the 2020 budget the UK government committed 1.5 billion pounds over five years to improve further education colleges. Stephen Gibbons, Claudia Hupkau, Sandra McNally and Henry Overman write that the policy should help...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The Effects of College Capital Projects on Student Outcome

The general debate on the relationship between school resources and student outcomes is an old and controversial one (for reviews see, for example, Hanushek, 1989, 1997 and Gibbons and McNally, 2013), although there is l...Read more...

Journal article

Science and Public Policy:

Systems of innovation, diversification, and the R&D trap: A case study of Kuwait

The relationship between research and development (R&D) investment and economic development is well established. Yet, at a global scale, the resource-rich countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council are consistent outliers...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How new technology can help clinical quality, productivity, and the healthcare workforce

Health information and communication technology (HICT) holds enormous potential to improve productivity. Several countries, the UK and the US included, have embraced this idea and spent billions of dollars on promoting H...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Efficient industrial policy for innovation: standing on the shoulders of hidden giants

Efficient R&D subsidies target technology fields where innovation generates the most valuable knowledge spillovers. To quantify potential efficiency gains from targeting, we infer field-specific subsidy return rates from...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

"Better the devil you know": are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?

Most people want to be both happy and healthy. But which matters most when there is a trade-off between them? This paper addresses this question by asking 4,000 members of the public in the UK and the US to make various ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Sink or swim time? Social mobility and the 2021 Budget

Lee Elliot Major assesses the prospects for social mobility and economic recovery in Rishi Sunak's 2021 Budget....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intangibles and industry concentration: supersize me

This paper presents new evidence on the growing scale of big businesses in the United States, Japan and 11 European countries. It documents a broad increase in industry concentration across the majority of countries and ...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...

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...

Blog

VoxEU:

Natural experiments in labour economics and beyond: the 2021 Nobel laureates David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", and to Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happy to help: NHS volunteering in Covid-19 times

The Covid-19 crisis prompted thousands to register as NHS Volunteer Responders, helping vulnerable people with small daily tasks like shopping. Christian Krekel and colleagues find big increases in wellbeing among those ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Learning loss since lockdown

Young people in education have lost significant amounts of time in school during the pandemic - and this carries risks of lifetime scars. Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin reveal the scale of learning los...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Move on up

In the third and final anniversary lecture marking 30 years since CEP began, director Stephen Machin focused on social mobility - the extent to which young people's opportunities in life can transcend their family backgr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Population Economics: Forthcoming

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949-2017

This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian Peop...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Inclusion in the workplace: how not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

Sitting at a focal point between east and west, Singapore has a nuanced and multi-layered cultural landscape that exemplify the importance of context for behavioural interventions to promote diversity and inclusion (D&I)...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The backlash of globalization

We review the literature on the globalization backlash, seen as the political shift of voters and parties in a protectionist and isolationist direction, with substantive implications on governments' leaning and enacted p...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...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance: Forthcoming

The Effects of Parental Job Loss on Children’s Outcomes

Severe economic downturns are typically characterized by a high incidence of job losses. The available evidence suggests that job losers suffer short-run earning losses that persist in the long run, are more likely to re...Read more...

Journal article

History of the Family:

Households and entrepreneurship in England and Wales, 1851-1911

This article uses the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE) to examine the relationship between the household and entrepreneurship in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The BBCE allows three kinds of entr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What triggers stock market jumps?

We examine next-day newspaper accounts of large daily jumps in 16 national stock markets to assess their proximate cause, clarity as to cause, and the geographic source of the market-moving news. Our sample of 6,200 mark...Read more...

Blog

Higher Education Policy Institute:

Why highly selective universities need to demystify admissions for student applicants

In light of Covid-19's impact on A-level results, Lee Elliot Major and Kieran Tompkins dispel misconceptions around university admissions, such as the number of students drawn from private and state schools at Russell Gr...Read more...

Journal article

Small Business Economics:

Homophily and peer influence in early-stage new venture informal investment

Abstract: Conceptualising early-stage new venture informal investors as co-entrepreneurs whose actions are socially embedded, we examine the role of social influence and how it interplays with entrepreneurial experience ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

A local community course that raises wellbeing and pro-sociality: Evidence from a randomised controlled trial

Despite a wealth of research on its correlates, relatively little is known about how to effectively raise wellbeing in local communities by means of intervention. Can we teach people to live happier lives, cost-effective...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...

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...

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

LSE Review of Books:

Book Review: What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? by Lee Elliott Major and Stephen Machin

In What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? Lee Elliott Major and Stephen Machin give an account of the long experience of social mobility in the UK, its barriers and a possible way out. Offering a st...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...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Happy to help: how a UK micro-volunteering programme increased people's wellbeing

Levels of wellbeing increased significantly for individuals who participated in the NHS Volunteer Responders (NHSVR) programme, with effects lasting months after the volunteering period had ended, write Paul Dolan, Chris...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Organizing Global Supply Chains: Input-Output Linkages and Vertical Integration

We study how the technological importance of inputs—measured by cost shares—is related to the decision to “make” or “buy” that input. Using detailed French international trade data and an instrumental variable approach b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happy to help: welfare effects of a nationwide volunteering programme

We study the wellbeing benefits from volunteering in England's National Health Service (NHS) Volunteer Responders programme, which was set up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using combined survey and administrative...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Vaccines for developing countries: the costs and benefits of waiving patents

There is much debate about whether the patents on COVID-19 vaccines should be waived to allow low-income countries to produce doses for themselves. The Initiative on Global Markets Forum's survey asked European and US ex...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Formation of college plans: expected returns, preferences and adjustment process

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study the determinants of college attendance and the role played by one's environment. We analyze whether, and how quickly, adolescents' college plans are adapted, explore factors le...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...

Journal article

Economics and Human Biology:

Prenatal economic shocks and birth outcomes in UK cohort data

We consider the effects of major prenatal economic shocks experienced by mothers on two indicators of newborn-infant health, birth weight and head circumference, using detailed microdata from the UK ALSPAC survey. Contro...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...

Journal article

The Lancet Public Health :

Policy stringency and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal analysis of data from 15 countries

To date, public health policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic have been evaluated on the basis of their ability to reduce transmission and minimise economic harm. We aimed to assess the association between COV...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Beyond income inequality: factoring in non-monetary rewards

While many researchers, policy makers, and interest groups are concerned with income inequality and its impact on society, much of the debate has focused on inequality in wages. In contrast, relatively little work has ad...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Ethnic minorities and the UK labour market: are things getting better?

Alan Manning and Rebecca Rose compare disparities in pay, employment and unemployment among different ethnic groups in the UK finding that there has been little change over the past 25 years. Indeed, for black, Pakistani...Read more...

Journal article

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin:

Inequality and Social Rank: Income Increases Buy More Life Satisfaction in More Equal Countries

How do income and income inequality combine to influence subjective well-being? We examined the relation between income and life satisfaction in different societies, and found large effects of income inequality within a ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

A year in the UK labour market: what's happened over the coronavirus pandemic?

Jonathan Wadsworth explains how the performance of the UK labour market during Covid-19 shows that the most notable effects of a downturn caused by restrictions on mobility are the more dynamic aspects: falls in hours, h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does growing up in a recession increase compassion? The case of attitudes towards immigration

Macroeconomic conditions during young adulthood have a persistent impact on people's attitudes and preferences. The seminal paper by Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2014) shows that people who grew up in a recession are more l...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...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Almost two-thirds of Black British young people would be reluctant to get a Covid vaccine

We may need to vaccinate under-18s to get the pandemic under control. Patrick Sturgis (LSE), Lindsey Macmillan, Jake Anders and Gill Wyness (UCL Institute of Education) on the findings of a UCL CEPEO / LSE COVID-19 surve...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How have school closures affected children's mental health?

Children in year groups that were not priorities to return to school before the 2020 summer holidays experienced greater average declines in their mental health. As schools re-open, it is vital to balance efforts to make...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

How a focus on wellbeing can help us make better policy decisions

Deaths, hospitalisations and cases have been the default metrics for policymakers during the pandemic. Paul Dolan (LSE) and a team of behavioural science experts propose a broader way of measuring policy outcomes that co...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...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The long shadow of slavery

The politics and economy of the antebellum American South were dominated by those who practiced forced enslavement. Research by Luna Bellani, Anselm Hager and Stephan Maurer, which examines a database of Texas legislator...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unequal learning and labour market losses in the crisis: consequences for social mobility

The unequal learning and labour market losses arising in the UK due to the Covid-19 pandemic are used to assess the consequences for social mobility. Labour market and learning losses have been more pronounced for people...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

To recover from Covid and Brexit, the UK must upskill its workforce

The twin forces of Covid-19 and Brexit are altering the skills that people require to succeed in work. Skill levels remain low in the UK, compared to other advanced nations. About 30% of adults have low skill levels in l...Read more...

Journal article

Canadian Journal of Economics:

On the interpretation of diploma wage effects estimated by regression discontinuity designs

Several recent papers employ regression discontinuity (RD) designs to estimate the causal effect of a diploma or similar credentials on wages. I build a model of knowledge acquisition, test-taking and labour market caree...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

Journal of Economic Geography:

Colonial legacies: Shaping African cities

Institutions persisting from colonial rule affect the spatial structure and conditions under which 100s of millions of people live in Sub-saharan African cities. In a sample of 318 cities, Francophone cities have more co...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...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Early-life correlates of later-life well-being: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

We here use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to provide one of the first analyses of the distal (early-life) and proximal (later-life) correlates of older-life subjective well-being. Unusually, we have tw...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the externalities of renewable energy plants using wellbeing data: the case of biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The grandkids aren't alright: the intergenerational effects of prenatal pollution exposure

Using newly linked survey and administrative data, providing more than 150 million parent-child links, we show that regulation-induced improvements in early life air quality have intergenerational effects on human capita...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does pricing carbon mitigate climate change? Firm-level evidence from the European Union emissions trading scheme

In theory, market-based regulatory instruments correct market failures at least cost. However, evidence on their efficacy remains scarce. Using administrative data, we estimate that, on average, the EU ETS - the world's ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Covid-19 and social mobility: the public support key policies that will help limit widening inequalities in employment and education

Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles, and Stephen Machin present new data around public support behind the implementation of job guarantees, the reform of A-level and GCSE exams in 2021, and the abolition of predicted grades f...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happier lives: exploring what matters

Can we teach people to live happier and more pro-social lives? Are there cost-effective and scalable interventions? And could the effects be sustained over time? Christian Krekel and colleagues have evaluated the impact ...Read more...

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Quantifying the gap between equilibrium and optimum under monopolistic competition

Equilibria and optima generally differ in imperfectly competitive markets. Although this is well understood theoretically, it is unclear how large the welfare distortions are in the aggregate economy. Do they matter quan...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Generation COVID: emerging work and education inequalities

The purpose of this brief paper is to present initial findings from the recently collected LSE-CEP Social Mobility survey, which was undertaken as part of our UKRI project ‘Generation COVID and Social Mobility: Evidence ...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 discussion paper

Prime locations

We harness big data to detect prime locations - large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services - in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The social determinants of choice quality: evidence from health insurance in the Netherlands

Market provision of impure public goods such as insurance, retirement savings and education is common and growing as policy makers seek to offer more choice and gain efficiencies. This approach induces an important trade...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

Economic Policy:

School choice during a period of radical school reform. Evidence from academy conversion in England

We study how demand responds to the rebranding of existing state schools as autonomous 'academies' in the context of a radical and large-scale reform to the English education system. The academy programme encouraged scho...Read more...

Book

What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility?

In this vital new book, Britain's first Professor of Social Mobility Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin, reveal the causes of the UK's low social mobility, explain why it's getting worse, and outline how we reverse this...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

All these worlds are yours, except india: The effectiveness of cash subsidies to export in nepal

This paper studies the impact of a ‘textbook’ ad-valorem export subsidy on firm-level export performance. The Cash Incentive Scheme for Exports (CISE) program offered by the government of Nepal offers a cash subsidy to f...Read more...

External publication

Vulnerabilities of supply chains post-Brexit

Arla Foods UK has commissioned LSE Consulting's Trade Policy Hub to deliver a study on the vulnerabilities of supply chains in the United Kingdom and the European Union after Brexit. This study provides a follow up to th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The long shadow of slavery: the persistence of slave owners in Southern law-making

This paper documents the persistence of the Southern slave owning elite in political power after the end of the American Civil War. We draw on a database of Texan state legislators between 1860 and 1900 and link them to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parental well-being in times of Covid-19 in Germany

We examine the differential effects of Covid-19 and related restrictions on individuals with dependent children in Germany. We specifically focus on the role of school and day care center closures, which may be regarded ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Center-based care and parenting activities

We estimate the effects of center-based care on parenting activities with children using data from time diaries and a family survey for Germany. Our estimates imply that usage of center-based care reduces the amount of t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Covid-19 and social mobility

Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin propose urgent actions to tackle economic and educational inequalities in Britain...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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...

Journal article

European Journal of Finance:

Is firm-level clean or dirty innovation valued more?

We examine how Tobin's Q is linked to 'clean' and 'dirty' innovation and innovation efficiency at the firm level. Clean innovation relates to patented technologies in areas such as renewable energy generation and electri...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. W...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: a response to the responses

We are very happy to see the engagement of so many eminent scholars in our field with our modest proposal for how to proceed with wellbeing policy formation in the UK. We are also heartened by the apparent endorsement of...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Where versus What: College Value-Added and Returns to Field of Study in Further Education

Enrolling in vocational education and training programs constitutes a natural response to the current dynamics of the labour market, which is being reshaped by routinisation, automation, and outsourcing. We estimate the ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Place-based policies and spatial disparities across European cities

Spatial disparities in income and worklessness across areas of the European Union are profound and persistent. Concerns about these disparities and the appropriate policy response are longstanding. Two trends have re-ene...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and social mobility

Governments are having to balance short- and long-term interests, and the trade-offs they generate, as they try to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Social distancing measures may limit the number of immediate deaths f...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2020

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. The World Happiness Report 2020 for the first time ranks ci...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All these worlds are yours, except India: the effectiveness of cash subsidies to export in Nepal

This paper studies the impact of a `textbook' ad-valorem export subsidy on firm-level export performance. The Cash Incentive Scheme for Exports (CISE) program offered by the government of Nepal offers a cash subsidy to f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

O brother, where start thou? Sibling spillovers on college and major choice in four countries

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger s...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Covid-19 is increasing the divide in life chances between rich and poor

Covid-19 is increasing the divide in life chances between rich and poor Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin propose reforms and urgent actions to tackle economic and educational inequalities in the UK....Read more...

CEP occasional paper

When to release the lockdown: a wellbeing framework for analysing costs and benefits

In choosing when to end the lockdown, policy-makers have to balance the impact of the decision upon incomes, unemployment, mental health, public confidence and many other factors, as well as (of course) upon the number o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Machiavelli versus concave utility functions: should bads be spread out or concentrated?

Is wellbeing higher if the same number of negative events is spread out rather than bunched in time? Should positive events be spread out or bunched? We answer these questions exploiting quarterly data on six positive an...Read more...

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Measuring Aggregate Price Indices with Taste Shocks: Theory and Evidence for CES Preferences

We develop an approach to measuring the cost of living for CES preferences that treats demand shocks as taste shocks that are equivalent to price shocks. In the presence of relative taste shocks, the Sato-Vartia price in...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A local community course that raises mental wellbeing and pro-sociality

Although correlates of mental wellbeing have been extensively studied, relatively little is known about how to effectively raise mental wellbeing in local communities by means of intervention. We conduct a randomised con...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Public investment in defence research can increase business innovation

That doesn't mean that defence R&D is the most efficient way to stimulate private sector innovation and productivity, write Enrico Moretti, Claudia Steinwender and John van Reenen....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...

CEP election analysis

#GE2019Economists: the research evidence on key issues for voters in the 2019 UK General Election

The general election of 2019 was called after negotiations over how the UK should leave the European Union became increasingly tortuous. While Brexit may have been the trigger for the election, it was far from being the ...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Health and social care

The National Health Service (NHS) is arguably the one national institution that unifies the country in terms of general public support. But there is growing concern about the long-term sustainability of the NHS, with 57%...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Social mobility

Debates over how to improve life prospects for people irrespective of their family background promise to be a key theme in the run-up to the 2019 General Election. This briefing summarises evidence on social mobility fro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. W...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The causes and consequences of early-adult unemployment: Evidence from cohort data

We here use the employment-history data from the British Cohort Study to calculate an individual's total experience of unemployment from the time they left education up to age 30. We show that, conditional on current une...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Socio-economic inequality and academic match among post-compulsory education participants

The study investigates the impact of socioeconomic background on the academic match of students in post-compulsory upper-secondary education making use of detailed individual-level linked administrative data from schools...Read more...

Blog

LSE Review of Books:

Book Review: Social Mobility and its Enemies by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin

In Social Mobility and its Enemies, Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin offer a thought-provoking assessment of the state of social mobility in Britain. In the context of much social and political change and rising level...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Understanding day care enrolment gaps

We document day care enrolment gaps by family background in a country with a universal day care system (Germany). Research demonstrates that children of less educated or foreign-born parents can benefit the most from day...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

Vertical integration and foreclosure: evidence from production network data

This paper studies the prevalence of vertical market foreclosure using a novel dataset on U.S. and international buyer-seller relationships, and across a large range of industries. We find that relationships are more lik...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dirty density: air quality and the density of American cities

We study whether urban density affects the exposure of city dwellers to ambient air pollution using satellite-derived measures of air quality for the contiguous United States. For identification, we rely on an instrument...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Who Got the Brexit Blues? The Effect of Brexit on Subjective Wellbeing in the UK

We use the 2015–16 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society) to look at subjective wellbeing around the time of the June 2016 EU membership Referendum in the UK (Brexit). We employ measures of ...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Special Economic Zones and WTO Compliance: Evidence from the Dominican Republic

Special economic zones (SEZ), one of the most important instruments of industrial policy used in developing countries, often impose export share requirements (ESR). That is, firms located in SEZ are required to export mo...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Healthy minds: the positive impact of a new school curriculum

As the UK government prepares to make personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education compulsory, a recent trial shows how these subjects can be taught successfully. Grace Lordan and Alistair McGuire evaluate the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Widening the high school curriculum to include soft skill training: impacts on health, behaviour, emotional wellbeing and occupational aspirations

From 2020 the health and relationships aspects of Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education will be compulsory in UK schools for adolescents. However less is known about how it can be taught in an effective manner....Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Amplifying Islamophobic hate crime: UK media in the wake of terror attacks

Ria Ivandic,Tom Kirchmaier, and Stephen Machin study the empirical connections between local anti-Muslim hate crimes and international jihadi terror attacks. They find that local Muslim populations face a media-magnified...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Childhood circumstances and young adult outcomes: the role of parental financial problems

Is there a relationship between childhood circumstances and outcomes later on in life? Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D’Ambrosio, and Marta Barazzetta consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults who ...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

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The price ain't right? hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured

We use insurance claims data covering 28% of individuals with employersponsored health insurance in the United States to study the variation in health spending on the privately insured, examine the structure of insurer-h...Read more...

Journal article

Health Affairs:

Hospital prices grew substantially faster than physician prices for hospital-based care in 2007-14

Evidence suggests that growth in providers' prices drives growth in health care spending on the privately insured. However, existing work has not systematically differentiated between the growth rate of hospital prices a...Read more...

Journal article

Health Affairs:

Variation in health spending growth for the privately insured from 2007 to 2014

We examined the growth in health spending on people with employer-sponsored private insurance in the period 2007-14. Our analysis relied on information from the Health Care Cost Institute data set, which includes insuran...Read more...

Journal article

IZA World of Labor:

Intergenerational income persistence

A strong association between incomes across generations—with children from poor families likely to be poor as adults—is frequently considered an indicator of insufficient equality of opportunity. Studies of such “interge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where is the Land of Hope and Glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For England and Wales, a paucity of data has made this a difficult question to reliably answer. This paper p...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

The bedroom tax

Housing subsidies for low income households are a central pillar of many welfare systems, but an expensive one. This paper investigates the consequences of an unusual policy aimed at reducing the cost of these subsidies ...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...

Journal article

The Lancet:

Transparency about the outcomes of mental health services (IAPT approach): an analysis of public data

Background: Internationally, the clinical outcomes of routine mental health services are rarely recorded or reported; however, an exception is the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service, which...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...

Journal article

Journal of Housing Economics:

Housing in Europe: A different continent – A continent of differences

This article provides the introduction to the special issue on ‘Housing in Europe: a different continent – a continent of differences’ in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018. Europe is a large continent with a long ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Convenient primary care and emergency hospital utilisation

Participation and utilisation decisions lie at the heart of many public policy questions. I contribute new evidence by using hospital records to examine how access to primary care services affects utilisation of hospital...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Aid: it’s not just about the money

For more than a decade, CEP research associate Peter Boone and his colleagues at Effective Intervention have been running health and education programmes in some of the poorest parts of the world. As he recounts here, th...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Social mobility and its enemies

Increasingly it seems that the rich and poor of Britain are destined to stay on the same rungs of the economic or social ladder for successive generations. A new book by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin calls for an a...Read more...

Book

Social Mobility and its Enemies

Apart from the USA, Britain has the lowest social mobility in the Western world. The lack of movement in who gets where in society - particularly when people are stuck at the bottom and the top - costs the nation dea...Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine:

Life satisfaction, QALYs, and the monetary value of health

The monetary value of a quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is frequently used to assess the benefits of health interventions and inform funding decisions. However, there is little consensus on methods for the estimation o...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The bedroom tax

The ‘bedroom tax’ – a UK government policy introduced in 2013 that cut housing benefits for social tenants deemed to have a ‘spare’ bedroom – saved some public money, according to research by Steve Gibbons and colleagues...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Diffusion of social values through the lens of US newspapers

Changing attitudes are the result of a battle for hearts and minds in which agents for and against change try to persuade others. We know very little about this process. This paper develops a methodology for measuring se...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...

Blog

ESRC blog:

Becoming a Research Institute: the Centre for Economic Performance

by Stephen Machin As Director of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at LSE, I am delighted that the Centre has been named as one of the two inaugural ESRC Research Institutes. This is testament to the achievements...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

The bedroom tax

Housing subsidies for low income households are a central pillar of many welfare systems, but an expensive one. This paper investigates the consequences of an unusual policy aimed at reducing the burden of these subsidie...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Consumer Psychology:

The Power of Voice in Stimulating Morality: Eliciting Taxpayer Preferences Increases Tax Compliance

Decisions about paying taxes represent one of the most common moral quandaries faced by citizens. In the present research, we argue that taxpayer compliance can be raised by increasing "voice": allowing taxpayers to expr...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

You've come a long way, baby. Husbands' commuting time and family labour supply

This paper explores the effects of husbands’ commuting time on wives’ employment and family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model, and we show that when market services are imperfect substitutes of home prod...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Skills, Signals, and Employability: An Experimental Investigation

As skills of labor-market entrants are usually not directly observed by employers, individuals acquire skill signals. To study which signals are valued by employers, we simultaneously and independently randomize a broad ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Locus of Control and its Intergenerational Implications for Early Childhood Skill Formation

This article builds upon Cunha's (2015) subjective rationality model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on their children's early skill formation. We propose that this subjecti...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Health Economics:

Do you have to win it to fix it?: A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health-care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on the utilization of health-care services, and the choice between private and public health care in the United Kingdom. Our ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Surprise! Out-of-network billing for emergency care in the United States

Using insurance claims data capturing 8.9 million emergency episodes, we show that in 22% of cases, patients attended in-network hospitals, but were treated by out-of-network physicians. We find that out-of-network billi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Politics, hospital behaviour and health care spending

This paper examines the link between legislative politics, hospital behaviour, and health care spending. When trying to pass sweeping legislation, congressional leaders can attract votes by adding targeted provisions tha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The social origins of inventors

In this paper, we merge three datasets - individual income data, patenting data, and IQ data - to analyze the deterninants of an individual’s probability of inventing. We find that: (i) parental income matters even after...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

A question of degree: The effects of degree class on labor market outcomes

How does performance at university affect labor market outcomes? Employing a regression discontinuity design, we show that university degree class causally affects graduates’ industry, wages, and earnings. Our sample c...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

Special economic zones and WTO compliance: evidence from the Dominican Republic

Special economic zones (SEZ), one of the most important instruments of industrial policy used in developing countries, often impose export share requirements (ESR). That is, firms located in SEZ are required to export mo...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The Payoff to Vocational Qualifications: Reconciling Estimates from Survey and Administrative Data

This paper takes as a starting point the wage/earnings differentials associated with vocational qualifications that have been estimated in the literature. Two distinct parts of that literature are identified, using surve...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early-life correlates of later-life well-being: evidence from the Wisconsin longitudinal study

We here use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to provide one of the first analyses of the distal (early-life) and proximal (later-life) correlates of older-life subjective well-being. Unusually, we have tw...Read more...

Journal article

National Institute Economic Review:

Local economic effects of Brexit

This paper studies local economic impacts of the increases in trade barriers associated with Brexit. Predictions of the local impact of Brexit are presented under two different scenarios, soft and hard Brexit, which are ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Where industry is strong and where it’s weak – key facts of UK business geography

Financial services aren’t as London-centric as the creative industries, and the coast-inland divide is growing, write Sandra Bernick, Richard Davies, and Anna Valero. The UK’s financial services industry is not nearly as...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...

CEP discussion paper

Can raising instructional time crowd out student pro-social behaviour? Unintended consequences of a German high school reform

We study whether raising instructional time can crowd out student pro-social behaviour. To this end, we exploit a large educational reform in Germany that has raised weekly instructional hours for high school students by...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Social Tenants' Health: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Landlord Interventions

Objectives: To test whether a social landlord can improve health outcomes for older tenants and reduce their NHS usage by simple interventions. Design: Randomised controlled trial. Setting: Social housing in five London ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Technology Transfer:

Academic inventors: collaboration and proximity with industry

This paper addresses a number of fundamental research questions on university-industry (U-I) collaborations. Are U-I collaborations intrinsically different from other forms of collaboration, such as inter-firm or inter-u...Read more...

CEP Brexit analysis

The local economic effects of Brexit

This paper studies the local impacts of the increases in trade barriers associated with Brexit. Predictions of the local impact of Brexit are presented under two different scenarios, soft and hard Brexit. Average effects...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Retirement blues

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The key determinants of happiness and misery

Understanding the key determinants of people?s life satisfaction will suggest policies for how best to reduce misery and promote wellbeing. This paper provides evidence from survey data on USA, Australia, Britain and Ind...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Adjusting Your Dreams? High School Plans and Dropout Behaviour

At the end of middle school, many low-achieving students realise that they do not have the ability to get into selective high school programmes, which may be a source of disengagement and eventually lead them to drop out...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The hospital as a multi-product firm: the effect of hospital competition on value-added indicators of clinical quality

There is increasing international interest in using Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) to assess health care provider performance. PROMs are a fundamental advance on existing indicators of health care quality in t...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The NHS and Social Care: Prospects for Funding, Staffing and Performance into the 2020s

Health featured prominently in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), with the Leave campaign’s claim that Brexit would mean that £350 million extra money per week could be transferred fro...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Smart and illicit: Who becomes an entrepreneur and do they earn more?

We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between "entrepreneurs" and other business owners. We show that the incorporated self-employed and their businesses engage in activiti...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Take What You Can: Property Rights, Contestability and Conflict

Weak property rights are strongly associated with underdevelopment, low state capacity and civil conflict. In economic models of conflict, outbreaks of violence require a prize that is both valuable and contestable. This...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

What’s in a name? Expectations, heuristics and choice during a period of radical school reform

Education policy worldwide has sought to incentivize school improvement and facilitate pupil-school matching by introducing reforms that promote autonomy and choice. Understanding the way in which families form preferenc...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

How English care homes have coped with the National Living Wage

Giulia Giupponi is an ESRC-funded PhD student at the London School of Economics and a research assistant at the Centre for Economic Performance. Stephen Machin is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Does the presence of wind turbines have negative externalities for people in their surroundings? Evidence from well-being data

Throughout the world, governments foster the deployment of wind power to mitigate negative externalities of conventional electricity generation, notably CO2 emissions. Wind turbines, however, are not free of externalitie...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Superstar houses and the American mortgage frenzy

Clement Bellet shows how visible wealth inequality fuelled the US mortgage boom that preceded the financial crisis....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Origins of happiness

Understanding the key determinants of people’s life satisfaction makes it possible to suggest policies for how best to reduce misery and promote wellbeing. A forthcoming book by Richard Layard and colleagues discusses ev...Read more...

Journal article

The World Bank Economic Review:

Volunteerism after the tsunami: The effects of democratization

Using three waves of survey data from fishing villages in Aceh, Indonesia for 2005-09, we examine the determinants of local volunteer labor after the tsunami. Volunteer labor is the village public sector labor force for ...Read more...

Journal article

Kyklos:

Do More of Those in Misery Suffer from Poverty, Unemployment or Mental Illness?

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life...Read more...

Book

Origins of Happiness

What makes people happy? Why should governments care about people's well-being? How would policy change if well-being were the main objective? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human prio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The paradox of the Joneses: superstar houses and mortgage frenzy in suburban America

Despite a major upscaling of suburban houses over the last decades, house satisfaction has remained steady in the United States. I show that upward comparison in size can explain this paradox, as top housing size mirrore...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Industrial Organization:

International aspects of merger policy: A survey

This paper surveys the literature on merger policy in open economies. We first adopt a reduced-form approach to derive general insights on the scope for conflict between national antitrust authorities and on the gains fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Diversity and neighbourhood satisfaction

This paper investigates the impact of ethnic diversity on individuals’ overall satisfaction with and other aspects of their neighbourhood. It uses panel data and a variety of empirical methods to control for potential en...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Social mobility in the United States

There is considerable geographical variation in the opportunities available to disadvantaged children in the United States, according to research by Raj Chetty, who delivered the 2016 Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures at ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Stimulative Effect of an Unconditional Block Grant on the Decentralized Provision of Care

Understanding the impact of central government grants on decentralized health care provision is of crucial importance for the design of grant systems, yet empirical evidence on the prevalence of flypaper effects in this ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Does immigration harm the job prospects of the UK-born? Brexit and the UK labour market

Following the referendum vote to leave the European Union, the UK faces a trade-off between retaining access to the Single Market and restricting free movement of labour. Barbara Petrongolo considers the likely impact of...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Weekend opening of GP practices

Can increased access to GPs reduce overcrowding in hospitals' Accidents & Emergency departments? Research by Peter Dolton and Vikram Pathania assesses whether weekend GP opening hours introduced in 2013 in four surgeries...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Faster broadband: are there any educational benefits?

Governments around the world are committing substantial public funds to upgrading their broadband infrastructure, partly in the hope of promoting education. Research findings by Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and colleagues raise ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Social Policy:

Educational inequality, educational expansion and intergenerational mobility

The distribution of education by social background and the mobility prospects of society are intimately connected. To begin to predict future trends in mobility in the UK we bring together evidence on educational inequal...Read more...

Journal article

Applied Research in Quality of Life:

Estimating the Mental Health Effects of Social Isolation

It is frequently hypothesized that feelings of social isolation are detrimental for an individual’s mental health, however standard statistical models cannot estimate this effect due to reverse causality between the inde...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

The ‘photo-finish effect’: when third place winners are happier than second

Laura Kudrna, a London School of Economics scholarship PhD candidate, researches the effects of achievement on happiness, particularly focusing on examples of when greater success – be it financial, academic, romantic, o...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The aftermath of the Brexit vote – the verdict from a derided expert

John Van Reenen was disappointed but not surprised by the UK’s vote to Leave the EU. Whilst his own research predicts serious economic and political damage in the case of Brexit, he thought a Leave vote was a real possib...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Who voted Leave: the characteristics of individuals mattered, but so did those of local areas

Individual demographics had a huge effect in determining the outcome of the referendum, but the characteristics of local areas mattered as well, explain Monica Langella and Alan Manning. Immigration, the decline in manuf...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...

CentrePiece article

A shortage of nurses?

The government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has reluctantly recommended that nurses remain on the ‘shortage occupation list’, while criticising the health sector for failing to maintain a sufficient supply of UK ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The ‘Britain Alone’ scenario: how Economists for Brexit defy the laws of gravity

There is a degree of consensus among economists that a Brexit will make us worse off. The exception is recent work by Economists for Brexit. Their forecast of income gains from Brexit contrasts with all other economic an...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

Do cash transfers improve birth outcomes? Evidence from matched vital statistics, and program and social security data

There is limited empirical evidence on whether cash transfers to poor pregnant women improve children's birth outcomes and potentially help weaken the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Using a unique array of program a...Read more...

Journal article

Gerontology:

Associations between neighborhood characteristics, well-being and health vary over the life course

Background: Neighborhood characteristics are important determinants of individual health and well-being. For example, characteristics such as noise and pollution affect health directly, while other characteristics affect...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The question is not whether Brexit will cost the UK in economic terms but how much

For over two years, a research team at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) has been studying the likely impact of the UK leaving the European Union. Their latest report focuses on the impact of ‘Brexit’ through cha...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Medical Research:

Why we should spend more on mental health

Mental health problems affect roughly 1 in 5 adults, and 1 in 10 children at any one time. In rich countries they cause roughly 40% of disability, absenteeism and underperformance at work, and cost some 7% of GDP. Under ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Misery and mental health

Mental illness is a far bigger source of human misery than poverty or unemployment, according to research by Sarah Flèche and Richard Layard. They argue that we need to move beyond a purely materialistic conception of mi...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Taking Care of the Budget? Practice-level Outcomes during Commissioning Reforms in England

I investigate whether vesting budgets with doctors impacts treatment decisions and patients outcomes by exploiting the transitional phase of major recent health care reforms in England that passed budgets to consortia of...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Do inventors talk to strangers? on proximity and collaborative knowledge creation

This paper examines the characteristics of the collaborations between inventors in the United Kingdom (UK) by looking at what types of proximities - geographic, organisational, cognitive, social, and cultural-ethnic - be...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Higher education, career opportunities, and intergenerational inequality

The UK government has expressed a desire to increase social mobility, with policies to help achieve this aim focused on reducing inequalities in educational attainment. This paper draws together established and new infor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The price ain't right? Hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured

We use insurance claims data covering 28 percent of individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance in the US to study the variation in health spending on the privately insured, examine the structure of insurer-hosp...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...

Journal article

Frontiers in Psychology:

Why more psychological therapy would cost nothing

To tackle the huge problem of mental illness, England has launched a large programme of psychological therapy, which is being watched worldwide. The authors argue that it costs nothing, due to savings on welfare benefits...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Merger policy in a quantitative model of international trade

In a two-country international trade model with oligopolistic competition, we study the conditions on market structure and trade costs under which a merger policy designed to benefit domestic consumers is too tough or to...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses

Governments are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper presents a new empirical strategy to estimate the...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Offshoring and the Geography of Jobs in Great Britain

This paper investigates the impact of the offshoring of production activities on domestic jobs in Great Britain. The paper considers both the spatial heterogeneity across local labour markets and variations in the intens...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Intermediaries in international trade: Products and destinations

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different produc...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

Making the world a happier place

Professor Lord Richard Layard directs the Wellbeing Programme at the ESRC Centre for Economic Performance, and has made major contributions on unemployment, inflation, inequality and post-Communist reform. Author of the ...Read more...

Submission to a parliamentary inquiry and government consultation

Response to the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility - Call for Evidence on "Transitions from School to Work"

Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Corbyn and the political economy of nostalgia

Voting for Jeremy Corbyn as leader is a gut reaction to Labour’s electoral defeat. Corbyn does point to some real economic problems facing Britain but his policies are based largely on the kind of wishful thinking that i...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Productivity Plan: A sound framework, but gaps in policy persist. More is needed to get productivity growing again

Following the summer budget, the government released a productivity plan aimed at dealing with a chronic issue facing the UK’s economy. Anna Valero and John Van Reenen review the plan, writing that overall the plan is br...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Summer budget 2015: Osborne is right to raise wages, but a clearer productivity plan is required

Yesterday, George Osborne delivered the new government’s first budget in which he surprised many by hiking the minimum wage significantly. John Van Reenen reviews the measures introduced, writing that the Chancellor is r...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Are People Moving Home Less? An Analysis of Address Changing in England and Wales, 1971-2011, Using the ONS Longitudinal Study

Expectations of migration and mobility steadily increasing in the longer term, which have a long currency in migration theory and related social science, are at odds with the latest US research showing a marked decline i...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Is Internal Migration Slowing? An Analysis of Four Decades of NHSCR Records for England and Wales

This paper is prompted by the widespread acceptance that the rates of inter-county and inter-state migration have been falling in the USA and sets itself the task of examining whether this decline in migration intensitie...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Informal care and the great recession

Macroeconomic downturns can have both an important impact on the availability of informal care and the affordability of formal long-term care. This paper investigates how the demand for and provision of informal care cha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

ICT and education: evidence from student home addresses

Governments are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper presents a new strategy to estimate the causal ef...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do more of those in misery suffer from poverty, unemployment or mental illness?

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firming up inequality

Earnings inequality in the United States has increased rapidly over the last three decades, but little is known about the role of firms in this trend. For example, how much of the rise in earnings inequality can be attri...Read more...

CEP election analysis

A New Priority for Mental Health

Mental illness (especially depression and chronic anxiety) is the biggest single cause of misery in advanced countries. But only one quarter of those who are ill receive treatment. Mental health is crucial for wellbeing ...Read more...

CEP election analysis

#ElectionEconomics: The Research Evidence on Key Issues for Voters in the 2015 UK General Election

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigratio...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The NHS: Promises and productivity

In the general election debate about healthcare, all the parties are seeking to portray an NHS protected from major public sector expenditure cuts, with expansion in some areas. But according to Alistair McGuire and John...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Mental health and education decisions

Mental health problems have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and low educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a low international ranking both on me...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Budget 2015: What the Chancellor said and didn’t say

Who would have thought an election was around the corner? John Van Reenen looks at what George Osborne had to say in the budget speech as well as what he didn’t say; the Chancellor neither mentioned the productivity prob...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do you have to win it to fix it? A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of h...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Austerity in the UK: past, present and future

In this article, John Van Reenen looks at the UK’s economic performance since the global financial crisis and assesses the impact of austerity policies. He also examines the fiscal plans of the three major parties over t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economic Value of Local Social Networks

The idea that local social capital yields economic benefits is fundamental to theories of agglomeration, and central to claims about the virtues of cities. However, this claim has not been evaluated using methods that pe...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Walk This Way: Estimating Impacts of Walk in Centres at Hospital Emergency Departments in the English National Health Service

In publicly funded health care systems policy-makers face a dilemma: placing low acuity emergency care services outside hospitals may widen access to care and divert patients from making costly hospital visits, but may a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do women earn less even as social entrepreneurs?

Based upon unique survey data collected using respondent driven sampling methods, we investigate whether there is a gender pay gap among social entrepreneurs in the UK. We find that women as social entrepreneurs earn 29%...Read more...

Journal article

Feature Issue:

What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of well-being

Policy makers who care about well-being need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a mo...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Policy for better mental health

Treating mental illness should be a top national priority, especially as proven psychological therapies effectively cost nothing. Richard Layard explains how CEP research has led to a new deal for mental health – but muc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Education and health knowledge: evidence from UK compulsory schooling reforms

We investigate if there is a causal link between education and health knowledge using data from the 1984/85 and 1991/92 waves of the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS). Uniquely, the survey asks respondents what they ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Neighbourhood Turnover and Teenage Attainment

Theories about neighbours’ influence on children based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighb...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

Because I'm worth it: a lab-field experiment on the spillover effects of incentives in health

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task ? and then how...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wealth shocks and health outcomes: evidence from stock market fluctuations

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I sho...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...

CentrePiece article

Immigrant's access to social housing: perception and reality

Although most UK immigrants are likely to be eligible to apply for social housing, there is no evidence that they have preferential access – if anything the reverse seems to have been the case. But it does seem that ther...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration and the access to social housing in the UK

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the probability of being in social housing in the UK. In recent years immigrant households are slightly more likely than natives to be in social housing but once one c...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

Home computers and married women's labor supply

I consider how the availability of a personal computer at home changed employment for married women. I develop a theoretical model that motivates the empirical specifications. Using data from the U.S. CPS from 1984 to 20...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Everybody needs good neighbours?

There are large disparities between the achievements, behaviour and aspirations of children in different neighbourhoods – but does this mean that the place where you grow up determines your later life outcomes? Steve Gib...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Outsourcing and the shift from manufacturing to services

Giuseppe Berlingieri looks at the structural transformation of the US economy over the past 60 years....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...

CEP discussion paper

Upward social mobility, well-being and political preferences: evidence from the BHPS

The paper uses 18 waves of BHPS data to provide evidence of the roles of both own social status and upward mobility relative to one's parents on job and life satisfaction, preferences for redistribution, pro-public secto...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...

CentrePiece article

Lovely and lousy jobs

The phenomenon of ‘job polarisation’ is increasing inequality as the labour market splits into high- and low-wage work. According to Alan Manning, who coined the term a decade ago, we cannot ignore job polarisation – but...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of well-being

If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational persistence in income and social class: the impact of within-group inequality

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons’ earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urban Escalators and Inter-regional Elevators: The Difference that Location, Mobility and Sectoral Specialisation make to Occupational Progression

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevato...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2013

The second World Happiness Report, released on Sept 9th 2013, further strengthens the case that well-being should be a critical component of how the world measures its economic and social development....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...

CEP discussion paper

Winning big but feeling no better? The effect of lottery prizes on physical and mental health

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking)...Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics and Policy Blog:

UK Spending Review 2013: A triumph of politics over reason?

The UK’s Spending Review has been forced on the British Chancellor because weak economic growth has blown a hole in the deficit reduction programme. John Van Reenen welcomes the partial reversal of the hugely damaging cu...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Free to choose? The impact of healthcare reform

Has the introduction of greater choice and competition in healthcare in England led to improved outcomes for patients? The authors assess changes in the quality of care that hospitals provided for cardiac surgery patient...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Life Opportunities: The Evidence on the UK’s Declining Social Mobility

Read more...

Blog

LSE European Politics and Policy Blog:

Small isn’t always beautiful: The cost of regulation on French firms

France has a raft of labour-market regulations that kick in for firms with 50 workers or more. Luis Garicano and John Van Reenen use this threshold to identify the economic effects of size-contingent regulations. Such po...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neighbors, Knowledge, and Nuggets: Two Natural Field Experiments on the Role of Incentives on Energy Conservation

There is increasing research on the exogenous impact of descriptive social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The marginal income effect of education on happiness: estimating the direct and indirect effects of compulsory schooling on well-being in Australia

Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall well-being of citizens. However, little is known about the causal pathways through which education shap...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...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment in the Great Recession

This paper studies the responses of unemployment in Germany, the United States and Britain to the Great Recession of 2008-09 by making use of Beveridge curve analysis, and in the entire OECD with other techniques. It is ...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Do Large Departments Make Academics More Productive? Agglomeration and Peer Effects in Research

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Outsourcing and the Rise in Services

This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1948-2002. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US

This paper analyses how neighbors' income affect agents' well-being using unprecedented data from the BRFSS and the City of Somerville. We conduct a multi-scale approach at the county, ZIP code and street-levels and find...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment

About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese tra...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Moving Up and Sliding Down: An Empirical Assessment of the Effect of Social Mobility on Subjective Wellbeing

Many people remain in the same income group as their parents and this is a cause of much discussion and some concern. In this work, we examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using the B...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 occasional paper

Social policies and labor market outcomes in Latin America and the Caribbean: a review of the existing evidence

Latin America and the Caribbean have become in the last decade or so a formidable laboratory for the design and implementation of innovative social policies. In the face of an unprecedented surge in the number of non-con...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Science: why the gender gap?

Stereotypes, role models played by teachers and social norms influence girls’ academic self-concept and push girls to choose humanities rather than science. Do recruiters reinforce this strong selection by discriminating...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Working or shirking?

Over 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there is widespread skepticism over its impact highlighted by phrases like “shirking from home”. We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 13,0...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Free to Choose? Reform and Demand Response in the English National Health Service

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Enduring Impact of Childhood Experience on Mental Health: Evidence Using Instrumented Co-Twin Data

The question of whether there is a lasting effect of childhood experience on mental health has eluded causal measurement. We draw upon identical twin data and econometric instrumentation to provide an unbiased answer. We...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Selection Effects with Heterogeneous Firms

We provide a general characterization of which firms will select alternative ways of serving a market. If and only if firms' maximum profits are supermodular in production and marketaccess costs, more efficient firms wil...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 discussion paper

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Reply

This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Mental illness and the NHS

Richard Layard and colleagues reveal the shocking scale of mental illness in Britain - and how little the NHS does about it....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Musn't Grumble. Immigration, Health and Health Service Use in the UK and Germany

A rise in population caused by increased immigration, is sometimes accompanied by concerns that the increase in population puts additional or differential pressure on welfare services which might affect the net fiscal co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Cautionary Note on Using Industry Affiliation to Predict Income

Many literatures investigate the causal impact of income on economic outcomes, for example in the context of intergenerational transmission or well-being and health. Some studies have proposed to use employer wage differ...Read more...

CEP report

How mental illness loses out in the NHS a report by the Centre for Economic Performance's Mental Health Policy Group

Mental illness accounts for a massive share of the total burden of disease. Even when we include the burden of premature death mental illness accounts for 23% of the total burden of disease. Yet, despite the existence of...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...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Do Professors Really Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in a French Higher Education Institution

Stereotypes, role models played by teachers and social norms influence girls’ academic self-concept and push girls to choose humanities rather than science. Do recruiters reinforce this strong selection by discriminating...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Heterogeneity, Demand for Insurance and Adverse Selection

Recent empirical work finds that surprisingly little variation in the demand for insurance is explained by heterogeneity in risks. I distinguish between heterogeneity in risk preferences and risk perceptions underlying t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Ambition, Human Capital Acquisition and the Metropolitan Escalator

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by Fielding (1989). It argues that occupational p...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2012

The 2012 World Happiness Report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute’s director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteri...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intermediaries in International Trade: Direct Versus Indirect Modes of Export

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different produc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incentives for Quality over Time - The Case of Facebook Applications

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engag...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Integration on Productivity and Welfare Distortions Under Monopolistic Competition

A fundamental question in monopolistic competition theory is whether the market allocates resources efficiently. This paper generalizes the Spence-Dixit-Stiglitz framework to heterogeneous firms, addressing when the mark...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Mental Health and Education Decisions

Mental health problems - and depression in particular - have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and poor educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a lo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management Practices Across Firms and Countries

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing A...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Cash Transfers Improve Birth Outcomes? Evidence from Matched Vital Statistics, Social Security and Program Data

There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children’s birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statisti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Change and Persistence in the German Model of Collective Bargaining and Worker Representation

This paper depicts and examines the decline in collective bargaining coverage in Germany. Using repeat cross-section and longitudinal data from the IAB Establishment Panel, we show the overwhelming importance of behavior...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Bright Side of Social Capital: How 'Bridging' Makes Italian Provinces More Innovative

Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature. Existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on its impact on local innovative performance: some empirical analyses emphasize a positive...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does High Involvement Management Improve Worker Wellbeing?

Employees exposed to high involvement management (HIM) practices have higher subjective wellbeing, fewer accidents but more short absence spells than “like” employees not exposed to HIM. These results are robust to exten...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender Gaps Across Countries and Skills: Supply, Demand and the Industry Structure

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled- to-skilled gender wage gap and the correspo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wishful Thinking

An experiment tested whether and in what circumstances people are more likely to believe an event simply because it makes them better off. Subjects observed a financial asset's historical price chart, and received both a...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economics Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis

In this article I argue that the extent to which fiscal variables are capitalized into house prices has important economic implications. I synthesize an emerging literature that explores the conditions under which public...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity, Wages and Marriage: The Case of Major League Baseball

The effect of marriage on productivity and, consequently, wages has been long debated in economics. A primary explanation for the impact of marriage on wages has been through its impact on productivity, however, there ha...Read more...

Journal article

International Review of Psychiatry:

Implementing NICE guidelines for the psychological treatment of depression and anxiety disorders: The IAPT experience

The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme is a large-scale initiative that aims to greatly increase the availability of NICE recommended psychological treatment for depression and anxiety disorders...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Model for the Delivery of Evidence-Based PSHE (Personal Wellbeing) in Secondary Schools

Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) education is a non-statutory school subject designed to facilitate the delivery of a number of key competencies relevant to health, safety and wellbeing. As well as contributing...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual Voice in Employment Relationships: A Comparison Under Different Forms of Workplace Representation

This article considers the role of individual employee voice in regulating the ‘zone of acceptance’ within the employment relationship, and examines the extent to which different models of collective voice inhibit or fos...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Booms and Busts in Asset Prices

We show how low-frequency boom and bust cycles in asset prices can emerge from Bayesian learning by investors. Investors rationally maximize infinite horizon utility but hold subjective priors about the asset return proc...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Chernobyl: the long-term health and economic consequences

Hartmut Lehmann and Jonathan Wadsworth assess the long-lasting effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl disaster on the people of Ukraine....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Recursive Contracts

We obtain a recursive formulation for a general class of contracting problems involving incentive constraints. These constraints make the corresponding maximization (sup) problems non recursive. Our approach consists of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Chernobyl on Health and Labour Market Performance

Using longitudinal data from Ukraine we examine the extent of any long-lasting effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce. The variation i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Crime and Mental Wellbeing

Most estimates of the cost of crime focus on victims. Yet it is plausible that an even larger cost of crime occurs via its indirect impact on the mental wellbeing of non-victims. To test how crime affects individuals’ me...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Hospital performance: the impact of good management

CEP research highlights the potential role of improving the quality of hospital management for raising productivity in the UK healthcare sector...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...

CEP discussion paper

Does Management Matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven prim...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individualisation and Growing Diversity of Employment Relationships

At a time when the economic recession is more severe, and trade unions are weaker, than at any time since the War, it would be unproductive to speculate about the extent to which these changes have been imposed, acquiesc...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Academy schools under Labour combated disadvantage and increased pupil achievement: the coalition’s new policy may exacerbate existing inequalities

With the recent accusation that Michael Gove has been sending ‘mixed messages’ over academy schools, it is clear that the policy is still very controversial. Stephen Machin and James Vernoit take a step back and compar...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours’ background characteristics and p...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours’ background characteristics and p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Asymmetric Information Among Competing Insurgent Groups: Estimating an 'Emboldenment' Effect

This paper uses asymmetric access to information to test if an insurgency is factionalized. If it is factionalized, regional variation in information should influence attack levels as groups use violence to compete over ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual Voice in Employment Relationships: A Comparison Under Different Collective Voice Regimes

This article examines the relationship between individual and collective employee voice, and management-led voice (appraisal), under contrasted collective voice regimes. In the first, collective workplace voice depends o...Read more...

Submission to a parliamentary inquiry and government consultation

Department for Work and Pensions - 21st century welfare

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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

To Join or Not to Join? Factors Influencing Employee Share Plan Membership in a Multinational Corporation

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidize the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Map of Mental Health

This paper provides a comprehensive picture of mental health services in England, including staffing and expenditure, and the number of people in need and the number treated. Historically, this information has been split...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

LSE Centre for Economic Performance – A Note on Academy School Policy

The Academies programme3 was first introduced by the Labour government in September 2002, with the stated aim of improving the educational outcomes of some of the most disadvantaged pupils in English secondary schools. T...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

LSE Centre for Economic Performance: Reducing Crime: More Police, More Prisons or More Pay?

Crime is usually high on the list of voter concerns. This might seem surprising since total crime has fallen significantly since the mid 1990s. Yet two thirds of the population still (wrongly) think that crime is rising ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Hospital competition is good for patients, and for efficiency

The coalition government has taken great pains to assure the public that the NHS budget will be ‘ring-fenced’, and thus not subject to the cuts of 20 to 40 per cent forecast for other Whitehall departments. At the same t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The educational background of postgrad students

Has the boom in postgraduate courses in the UK over recent years had a negative impact on intergenerational mobility? Research by Stephen Machin and Richard Murphy suggests that there is a small but significant imbalance...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Making the UK's aid budget work better

All the UK's major parties agree on ring-fencing foreign aid spending at current levels, even while the country's dire financial situation requires sharp cuts to other budgets. Peter Boone draws on the evidence on aid ef...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Growth of Extended 'Entry Tournaments' and the Decline of Institutionalised Occupational Labour Markets in Britain

In recent years, British labour markets have been characterised by a decline of institutional regulation of entry routes into many occupations and internal labour markets. This paper examines this change by comparing occ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

LSE Centre for Economic Performance – all election analyses are now available

The complete series of Election Analyses from the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) is now available, summarising research evidence on some of the key policy battlegrounds of the 2010 UK General Election. The followi...Read more...

CEP election analysis

CEP Election Analysis 2010 - The complete Series, discussing research on some of the key policy battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election

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CEP election analysis

Health: Higher Spending has Improved Quality, But Productivity Must Increase

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CEP discussion paper

Slip Sliding Away: Further Union Decline in Germany and Britain

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present ...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Measuring the Returns to Lifelong Learning

This paper investigates the returns to lifelong learning, which is interpreted as the attainment of qualifications following entry into the labour market. For a number of reasons our analysis of the British Household Pan...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

New Housing Supply and the Dilution of Social Capital

This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Hospital Competition Save Lives? Evidence from the English NHS Patient Choice Reforms

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of the...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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

The Extent of Collective Bargaining and Workplace Representation: Transitions between States and their Determinants. A Comparative Analysis of Germany and Great Britain

Industrial relations are in flux in many nations, perhaps most notably in Germany and Britain. That said, comparatively little is known in any detail of the changing pattern of the institutions of collective bargaining a...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Do private equity owned firms have better management practices?

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Theory of Values

Economists have a well-developed theory of value but the theory of why people hold the values they do is rudimentary at best. In spite of the fact that it is common to argue that values are important, most work on values...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Organization of Firms Across Countries

We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sale...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Anatomy of a Health Scare: Education, Income and the MMR Controversy in the UK

One theory for why there is an education gradient in health outcomes is that more educated individuals more quickly absorb new health-related information. The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) controversy provides a case...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Long-Term Health Effects on the Next Generation of Ramadan Fasting During Pregnancy

Each year, many pregnant women fast from dawn to sunset during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Medical theory suggests that this may have negative long-term health effects on their offspring. Building upon the work of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Hot and Cold Seasons in the Housing Market

Every year during the second and thirdquarters (the “hot season”) housing markets in the UK and the US experience systematic above-trend increases in both prices and transactions. During the fourth and first quarters (th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Capital Flows and Asset Prices

After liberalizing international transactions of financial assets, many countries experience large swings in asset prices, capital flows, and aggregate production. This paper studies how the adjustment to capital account...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

'The Value of Rude Health': Employees' Well Being, Absence and Workplace Performance

This paper brings new evidence on the relationship between employees' well being, sickness absence and four dimensions of workplace performance i.e. productivity, efficiency, quality of service and profitability. It uses...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Importance of Relative Performance Feedback Information: Evidence from a Natural Experiment using High School Students

We study the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance under piece-rate incentives. A natural experiment that took place in a high school offers an unusual opportunity to test this effe...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

School Quality, Child Wellbeing and Parents Satisfaction

Researchers in economics of education usually assume that parents choose schools for their high academic performance, with some support from revealed preference evidence based on local house prices. However, anecdotal ev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Margins of US Trade

Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms’ extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In th...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe

This paper examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd’s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Modern Management: Good for the Environment or Just Hot Air?

We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

HRM practices and knowledge processes outcomes: empirical evidence from a quasi-experiment on UK SMEs in the tourism hospitality and leisure sector

This paper presents empirical evidence of the relationship between human resources practices and the effectiveness of a firm to capitalise on investment in knowledge as measured by the returns to innovation and business ...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

Talking Less and Moving the Market More: Is this the Recipe for Monetary Policy Effectiveness? Evidence from the ECB and the Fed

This paper examines and compares the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, and their effectiveness. First we do a comparative study exercise. We find that on monetary policy commi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime and the July 2005 Terror Attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of p...Read more...

EDS discussion paper

Beautiful Pixels - Aesthetic Innovation in Interactive Online Art: The Case of BoyBlack

In the context of broad-based technological innovation that has allowed new art-making and showing practices to become increasingly available to artists, the paper examines the possibility of aesthetic innovation in 'int...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of well-being? Although the strongest life satisfaction...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Impact of Early Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills on Later Outcomes

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CEP discussion paper

Maternal Smoking During Pregnancy and Early Child Outcomes

We estimate the harm from smoking during pregnancy upon child birth outcomes, using a rich dataset on a cohort of mothers and their births. We exploit a fixed effects approach to disentangle the correlation between smoki...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Shimer Puzzle and the Correct Identification of Productivity Shocks

Shimer (2005a) claims that the Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment lacks an ampiflication mechanism because it cannot generate the observed business cycle fluctuations in unemployment given labor productivi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Search Frictions, Real Rigidities and Inflation Dynamics

The standard New Keynesian model suffers from the so-called .macro-micro pricing conflict: in order to match the dynamics of inflation implied by macroeconomic data, the model needs to assume an average duration of price...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity, Aggregate Demand and Unemployment Fluctuations

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the cyclical behavior of US unemployment that poses a challenge to standard search and matching models. The correlation between cyclical unemployment and the cyclical compone...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic Linkages Across Space

We develop a diagrammatic framework that can be used to study the economic linkages between regions or cities. Hitherto, such linkages have not been the primary focus of either the theoretical or empirical literatures. W...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Urban Density and Pupil Attainment

We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although – as widely recognised – attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Respect

Becker (1974) introduced to modern economics the idea that others care about what others think about them and derived many useful insights from this assumption. But he did not provide a very complete description of the g...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Accounting for intergenerational income persistence: noncognitive skills, ability and education

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level...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...

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

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

Search and Matching Frictions and Optimal Monetary Policy

I analyze optimal monetary policy in an economy with search and matching frictions in the labor market and staggered nominal wage and price contracts. In this framework, as opposed to the standard New Keynesian model, pr...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Panic on the streets of London

The terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005 resulted in a very large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs. New research by Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt looks at the impact of this increased ...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Sheepskin or Prozac: The Causal Effect of Education on Mental Health

Mental illness is associated with large costs to individuals and society. Education improves various health outcomes but little work has been done on mental illness. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of educatio...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

Multi-Product Firms and Product Switching

This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching among U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that two-thirds of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that on...Read more...

CEP report

The Depression Report: A New Deal for Depression and Anxiety Disorders

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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...

CEP discussion paper

Basic Research and Sequential Innovation

The commercial value of basic knowledge depends on the arrival of follow-up developments mostly from outside the boundaries of the inventing firm. Private returns would depend on the extent the inventing firm internalize...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge Flow and Sequential Innovation: Implications for Technology Diffusion, R&D and Market Value

It is shown that spillovers can enhance private returns to innovation if they feed back into the dynamic research of the original inventor (Internalized spillovers), but will always reduce private returns, if the origina...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Gold Rush Theory of Economic Development

This paper presents a model of social learning about the suitability of local conditions for new business ventures and explores its implications for the microeconomic patterns of economic development. I show that: i) fir...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade Liberalization and Industrial Restructuring through Mergers and Acquisitions

This paper analyzes mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a previously neglected channel of industrial restructuring in the face of trade liberalization. Using the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement of 1989 as a natur...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

New Technology in Schools: Is There a Payoff?

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CEP discussion paper

Changes in Returns to Education in Latin America: the Role of Demand and Supply of Skills

Changes in the relative wages of workers with different amounts of education have profound implications for developing countries, where initial levels of inequality are often very high. In this paper we use micro data fo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Agglomeration and the Adjustment of the Spatial Economy

We consider the literatures on urban systems and New Economic Geography to examine questions concerning agglomeration and how areas respond to shocks to the economic environment. We first propose a diagrammatic framework...Read more...

Chapter

Changes in intergenerational mobility in Britain

in Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe

What economic regimes offer children born into poor families the best hope of moving into higher income groups? This study analyzes and contrasts the experience of the more free market based North American and British ec...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Financial Globalization and Exchange Rates

The founders of the Bret