Results

CEP discussion paper

Trade and intergenerational income mobility: Theory and evidence from the US

This paper studies the impact of globalization on intergenerational income mobility. Exploiting U.S. data, we find that stronger trade exposure at the commuting zone level lowers the intergenerational income mobility of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Income, wealth and environmental inequality in the United States

This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, wealth, and race by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979-2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic info...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Easterlin paradox at 50

We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries from 2009-2019 at both the individual and country levels to revisit the relationship between income and subjective wellbeing. Our inspiration is the paradox first pro...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What share of the economic pie goes to workers?

Over the last two decades, the proportion of national income going to employees and the self-employed - the labour share - has declined in many advanced economies. This has not happened in the UK, which might seem like g...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Sliding down the Great Gatsby curve in search of the Scandinavian dream

The new UK government has separate missions to break down the barriers to opportunity and to boost growth - together, the "Scandinavian dream". The problem, write Steve Machin and Lee Elliot Major, is Britain's high leve...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Capital-skill complementarity in firms and in the aggregate economy

We study capital-skill complementarity in a multi-sector framework featuring firm-specific, multi-factor production functions and allowing for firm-specific factor-price wedges. We characterize the elasticity of the skil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The distributional consequences of trade: Evidence from the Grain Invasion

We examine the distributional consequences of trade using the New World Grain Invasion that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. We use a newly-created dataset on population, employment by sector, property va...Read more...

Chapter

Money and happiness

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

Many people believe that earning more money would bring more happiness into their lives. However, despite massive improvements in material living conditions in most Western countries, average population happiness has sta...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...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Where does money matter more?

There is much still to learn about the relationship between income and well-being, and in particular how this may depend on the economic and social context. We use Russian data to estimate individual Welfare Functions of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Beyond the enrolment gap: Financial barriers and high-achieving, low-income students' persistence in higher education

Little is known about what influences high-achieving, low-income students' persistence in higher education, despite extensive work on their enrolment decision. This paper investigates the role of credit constraints. Usin...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...

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...

Chapter

Income inequality before, during, and after the transition in central and eastern Europe

in The Oxford Handbook of Post-Socialist Economies

This chapter explores the income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after the transition. It argues that the fall of communism and the transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe were landm...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The changing nature of pollution, income and environmental inequality in the United States

This paper uses administrative tax records linked to Census demographic data and high-resolution measures of fine small particulate (PM2.5) exposure to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap over t...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Why household income doesn't tell the full story on individual wellbeing

The literature on inequality often focuses on household income, but this measure has several limitations for assessing individual wellbeing. Tim Obermeier develops a new collective household model which simultaneously ac...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

New evidence on spatial wage inequality across North America and Western Europe

Spatial inequality has become a key policy concern across much of the advanced world, prompting a spate of government action on the issue in recent years. This column presents evidence showing that, contrary to the popul...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...

CEP discussion paper

The measure of monopsony: the labour supply elasticity to the firm and its constituents

The estimation of labour supply elasticities is central to the measurement of monopsony power in the labor market. In this paper I provide new, firm-level estimates of the labour supply elasticity that distinguish betwee...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...

Journal article

Quantitative Economics:

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

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

CEP discussion paper

The wage elasticity of recruitment

One of the factors affecting the market power of employers is the extent to which higher wages makes recruitment easier. There is very little research on this. This paper presents a methodology for estimating the wage el...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...

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

Energy for Sustainable Development : Forthcoming

Assessing reliability of electricity grid services from space: the case of Uttar Pradesh, India

While most households around the world have access to electricity, the number of hours per day when the grid supplies them with adequate voltage can be low. Improving the reliability of electricity is crucial to make pro...Read more...

Journal article

Japanese Economic Review:

The Joneses in Japan: income comparisons and financial satisfaction

This paper uses relatively large-scale internet survey data from Japan to analyse income comparisons and income satisfaction. In contrast to the vast majority of empirical work in the area of subjective well-being, we ar...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Inequality : Forthcoming

Correction to: the fall in income inequality during Covid-19 in four European countries (The Journal of Economic Inequality, (2021)

The original version of this article was published online with missing legends and notes in the Figs. 1,2,3,4 and 5. ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Quantifying the full impact of country-specific policies on trade flows

Rebecca Freeman, Mario Larch, Angelos Theodorakopoulos and Yoto Yotov propose a solution to issues measuring country-specific impact using structural gravity models - a popular way to analyse the impact of trade policie...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics: Forthcoming

Blame it on the rain: rainfall variability, consumption smoothing, and subjective well-being in rural Ethiopia

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi...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...

Journal article

National Tax Journal:

How did safety-net reform affect early adulthood among adolescents from low-income families?

In the 1990s, the US safety net was substantially reformed. We ask how those reforms collectively affected early-career outcomes among youths who were teens when the reforms took effect. We consider employment, safety-ne...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Inequality:

The fall in income inequality during COVID-19 in four European countries

We here use panel data from the COME-HERE survey to track income inequality during COVID-19 in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Relative inequality in equivalent household disposable income among individuals changed in...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Growth:

Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892–2015

We construct the first consistent series on the long-term distribution of income in Poland by combining tax, household survey and national accounts data. We document a U-shaped evolution of inequalities from the end of t...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...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Parents, Schools and Human Capital Differences Across Countries

This paper studies the contribution of parental influence in accounting for cross-country gaps in human capital achievements. We argue that the cross-country variation in unobserved parental characteristics is at least a...Read more...

Journal article

Health Economics (United Kingdom):

Childhood circumstances and young adulthood outcomes: The role of mothers' financial problems

We here consider the cognitive and noncognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and ...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics:

Rainfall Variability, Child Labor, and Human Capital Accumulation in Rural Ethiopia

How does income uncertainty affect human capital investments in agrarian economies? Using child-level panel data, I exploit a medium-run change in mean-preserving rainfall variability to identify the effects of income un...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...

CVER Briefing Note

Post-18 education – who is taking the different routes and how much do they earn?

This paper describes the educational trajectories and labour market outcomes for people who completed their GCSEs between 2002 and 2006. Our long span of longitudinal data enables us to follow these individuals through t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Automating labor: evidence from firm-level patent data

Do higher wages lead to more automation innovation? To answer this question, we first introduce a new measure of automation by using the frequency of certain keywords in patent text to identify automation innovations in ...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...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Ease vs. noise: Long-run changes in the value of transport (dis)amenities

For a complete cost-benefit analysis of durable infrastructures, it is important to understand how the value of non-market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long-run. We ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The long-term effects of financial distress in childhood

Is there a relationship between childhood circumstances and outcomes later in life? Andrew Clark and colleagues consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences for young adults whose families experienced major fina...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Between communism and capitalism: long-run inequality in Poland

How has inequality in Poland evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? Pawel Bukowski and Filip Novokmet chart a century of data on Polish inequality, 1892-2015, to exam...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When income effects are large: labor supply responses and the value of welfare transfers

I estimate the long-run income effect of welfare transfers on individual labor supply. Using Italian administrative data on the universe of survivor insurance recipients, I implement a regression discontinuity design aro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Ease versus noise: long-run changes in the value of transport (dis)amenities

For a complete cost-benefit analysis of durable infrastructures, it is important to understand how the value of non-market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long-run. We ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892-2015

How has Polish inequality evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? To address this question, we construct the first series on the long-term distribution of income in Po...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology gaps, trade and income

This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level tech...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth:

Neighbors' Income, Public Goods, and Well-Being

How does neighbors' income affect individual well-being? Our analysis is based on rich U.S. local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live and their s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trainspotting: 'good jobs', training and skilled immigration

While skilled immigration ceteris paribus provides an immediate boost to GDP per capita by adding to the human capital stock of the receiving economy, might it also reduce the number of ’good jobs’, i.e. those with train...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Protests as strategic games: Experimental evidence from Hong Kong's antiauthoritarian movement

Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual's participation a function of their beliefs about others' turnout. We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates indivi...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The unequal gains from product innovations: Evidence from the U.S. Retail sector

This article examines how product innovations led to inflation inequality in the United States from 2004 to 2015. Using scanner data from the retail sector, I find that annual inflation for retail products was 0.661 (std...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The economic effects of density: A synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 347 estimates of density elasticities of a broad range of outcomes ranging from wages, innovation, rents, various amenities, t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Childhood circumstances and young adulthood outcomes: the role of mothers' financial problems

We here consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Firming up inequality

We use a massive,matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (...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...

Journal article

European Journal of Population:

Happy People Have Children: Choice and Self-Selection into Parenthood

There is mixed evidence in the existing literature on whether children are associated with greater subjective well-being, with the correlation depending on which countries and populations are considered. We here provide ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Two-sided heterogeneity and trade

This paper develops a multicountry model of international trade that provides a simple microfoundation for buyer-seller relationships in trade. We explore a rich data set that identifies buyers and sellers in trade and e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Currency unions, trade and heterogeneity

How do trade costs affect international trade? This paper offers a new approach. We rely on a flexible gravity equation that predicts variable trade cost elasticities, both across and within country pairs. We apply this ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The role of demand in land re-development

Several governments throughout the world apply policies aimed to re-mediate and recover vacant or idle land for other uses. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity of redevelopment, a crucial parameter for...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Unfairness at work: Well-being and quits

We here consider the effect of the level of income that individuals consider to be fair for the job they do, which we take as measure of comparison income, on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of minimum wages on low-wage jobs: evidence from the United States using a bunching estimator

We propose a novel method that infers the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it. Using st...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Highways, Market Access and Spatial Sorting

We design a spatial model featuring workers embodied with heterogeneous skills. In equilibrium, locations with improved market access become relatively more attractive to the high-skilled, high-income earners. We then em...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Learning about the prospects for mobility: Economic and political dynamics following fundamental policy reform

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. This paper generalizes the forw...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Reference-dependent job search: Evidence from Hungary

We propose a model of job search with reference-dependent preferences, with loss aversion relative to recent income (the reference point). In this model, newly unemployed individuals search hard since consumption is belo...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Psychology:

Top incomes and human well-being: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll

The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about the relationship between the rising top income sh...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics:

When experienced and decision utility concur: The case of income comparisons

While there is now something of a consensus in the economics of happiness literature that income comparisons to others help determine subjective well-being, debate continues over the relative importance of own and refere...Read more...

Journal article

International Review of Economics:

Happiness, income and poverty

There is considerable evidence from a variety of sources to suggest that well-being is a function of relative income. These findings have been used to explain the Easterlin Paradox, whereby a rise in income for all does ...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...

Journal article

Economica:

Gender Inequality and Economic Development: Fertility, Education and Norms

We document the evolution of gender inequality in labour market outcomes—earnings, labour supply and wage rates—over the path of economic development, and present evidence on the potential reasons for this evolution. To ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economic Effects of Density: A Synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 15 outcome categories and 202 estimates of density elasticities from 102 studies. More than 50% of these estimates have not be...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A unified approach to estimating demand and welfare

The measurement of price changes, economic welfare, and demand parameters is currently based on three disjoint approaches: macroeconomic models derived from time-invariant utility functions, microeconomic estimation base...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Adaptation to poverty in long-run panel data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective wellbeing and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show, first,...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

No one would be spared: how the costs of Brexit would be distributed across households

That leaving the EU would damage the overall economy is now being treated as more of a fact than a speculation. But those for Brexit argue that the rich will be negatively affected while the poor will benefit. This is no...Read more...

Journal article

Science:

Inequality in mortality decreased among the young while increasing for older adults, 1990-2010

Many recent studies point to increasing inequality in mortality in the United States over the past 20 years. These studies often use mortality rates in middle and old age. We used poverty level rankings of groups of U.S....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Two-sided heterogeneity and trade

This paper develops a multi-country model of international trade that provides a simple micro-foundation for buyer-seller relationships in trade. We explore a rich dataset that identifies buyers and sellers in trade and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Top incomes and human well-being around the world

The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about how the rising top income shares affect human wel...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Income and Population Growth

Do populations grow as countries become richer? In this study we estimate the effects on population growth of shocks to national income that are plausibly exogenous and unlikely to be driven by technological change. For ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Wage stagnation and the legacy costs of employment

Although UK real wages have been stagnant for over a decade, there has been a notable increase in nonwage compensation. But as Brian Bell reveals, this rise consists largely of special payments to fund deficit gaps in '...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumption smoothing and the welfare cost of uncertainty

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Top Rate of Income Tax

The main political parties disagree about the appropriate rate of income Tax on the highest incomes. This note lays out the economic principles surrounding the top rate of income tax and considers the evidence that high ...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...

CEP discussion paper

Trust and racial income inequality: evidence from the US

Existing studies of trust formation in U.S. metropolitan areas have found that trust is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racial fragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of incom...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Adaptation to poverty in long-run panel data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show first...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Latin American efficiency gap

The average Latin American country produces about 1 fifth of the output per worker of the US. What are the sources of these enormous income gaps? I report development-accounting results for Latin America. On average Lati...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Money, well-being and loss aversion: does an income loss have a greater effect on well-being than an equivalent income gain?

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses impact on well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined with relation to decisions...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Wage growth and productivity growth: the myth and reality of 'decoupling'

Employees in the UK are not being denied their fair share of economic growth, according to research by João Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen. Their investigation of claims that wage growth has become ‘decoupled’ from pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Decoupling of wage growth and productivity growth? Myth and reality

It is widely believed that in the US wage growth has fallen massively behind productivity growth. Recently, it has also been suggested that the UK is starting to follow the same path. Analysts point to the much faster gr...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...

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...

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

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

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...

CEP occasional paper

Has the growth of real GDP in the UK been overstated because of mis-measurement of banking output?

If official figures overstated the growth of banking output in the UK in the recent boom, does this mean that GDP growth was overstated too? The answer is no. It is truer to say that if banking output was overstated then...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating the Influence of Life Satisfaction and Positive Affect on Later Income Using Sibling Fixed-Effects

The question of whether there is a connection between income and psychological well-being is a long-studied issue across the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences. Much research has found that richer people tend...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...

CEP discussion paper

Left, Right, Left: Income and Political Dynamics in Transition Economies

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upwar...Read more...

CEP report

UK economic performance since 1997: growth, productivity and jobs

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

CEP discussion paper

Measuring the (Income) Effect of Disability Insurance Generosity on Labour Market Participation

We analyze the employment effect of a law that provides for a 36 percent increase in the generosity of disability insurance (DI) for claimants who are, as a result of their lack of skills and of the labour market conditi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Step towards Valuing Utility the Marginal and Cardinal Way

Income has a direct impact on our utility as well as an indirect impact through the goods, services and life events it allows us to purchase. The indirect effect of income is not properly accounted for in existing resear...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International Trade Without CES: Estimating Translog Gravity

This paper derives a micro-founded gravity equation in general equilibrium based on a translog demand system that allows for endogenous markups and substitution patterns across goods. In contrast to standard CES-based gr...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Timing of Parental Income and Child Outcomes: The Role of Permanent and Transitory Shocks

How do shocks to parental income drive adolescent human capital, including years of schooling, high school dropout, university attendance, IQ and health? A structural model decomposes household shocks into permanent and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why is the US so Energy Intensive? Evidence from US Multinationals in the UK

At present the USA is - in per capita terms - the top greenhouse gas polluter among the world’s major economies. This is mirrored by the high energy intensity of all sectors of the US economy including manufacturing indu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Life satisfaction and relative income: perceptions and evidence

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broad...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The UK Intranational Trade Cycle

The paper uses annual data on real GDP for the UK regions and 12 manufacturing sectors to derive regional and regional/sectoral business cycles using an H-P filter. The cohesion of the cycles is examined via cross-correl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does relative income matter? Are the critics right?

Do other peoples’ incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection and Polarisation

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more prod...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Education and Income Inequality in the Regions of the European Union

This paper provides an empirical study of the determinants of income inequality across regions of the EU. Using the European Community Household Panel dataset for 102 regions over the period 1995-2000, it analyses how mi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection, and Polarisation

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more prod...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

The marginal utility of income

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Effort and Comparison Income: Experimental and Survey Evidence

This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort, combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with the analysis of multi-country ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative ef...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Is Free School Meal Status a Valid Proxy for Socio-Economic Status (in Schools Research)?

Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Marginal Utility of Income

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Barriers and the Transition to Modern Growth

This paper studies how differences in the size of barriers to capital accumulation can account for differences in long run economic development paths. In this model barriers affect both the beginning date and the pace of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

One Third of the World's Growth and Inequality

This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India û two economies that account for a third of the world's population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changes in intergenerational mobility in Britain

This paper compares and contrasts estimates of the extent of intergenerational income mobility over time in Britain. Estimates based on two British birth cohorts show that mobility appears to have fallen in a cross-cohor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Per Capita Income Demand for Variety, and International Trade: Linder Reconsidered

We analyse a monopolistically competitive model of international trade where goods must be consumed in indivisible amounts. The number of varieties that enter a consumer's optimal consumption bundle is increasing in the...Read more...