Results

CEP discussion paper

The broken ladder: AI, remote work, and early-career hiring

Is generative AI replacing junior workers? A growing literature answers yes, citing large declines in early-career hiring concentrated in GenAI-exposed occupations. We argue that this verdict is premature because GenAI e...Read more...

Journal article

World Development:

Virtuous outcomes of instrumental intentions? The case of Uruguay?s 1996 constitutional reform

In December 1996 a national referendum approved a constitutional reform that introduced substantial changes to Uruguay?s electoral system. We argue that this reform was proposed by Uruguay?s establishment parties to prev...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The economic impacts of the UK's eat out to help out scheme

We evaluate the economic impacts of the UK's Eat Out to Help Out (EOTHO) scheme on the food service sector. EOTHO was introduced during the COVID pandemic to stimulate demand by subsidizing the cost of eating out, with a...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings :

Negative weights are no concern in design-based specifications

Recent work shows that popular partially linear regression specifications can put negative weights on some treatment effects, potentially producing incorrectly signed estimands. We show that this is not an issue in desig...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fantastic beasts and where to find them

Fantastic beasts are magical creatures that cannot be seen unless one looks for them with the eye of the wizard, but that still play a significant role in the world. The fantastic beasts we hunt and find in the present p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The spillover effect of services offshoring on local labour markets

I provide new empirical evidence on the direct and indirect impact of services off-shoring on local employment and wages, using a unique dataset on firms in the UK for the period 2000-2015. Exploiting variation in firms'...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

On Track to Success? Returns to vocational education against different alternatives

Many countries consider expanding vocational curricula in secondary education to boost skills and labour market outcomes among non-university-bound students. However, critics fear this could divert other students from mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic impacts of the UK's eat out to help out scheme

We evaluate the economic impacts of the UK's Eat Out to Help Out (EOTHO) scheme on the food service sector. EOTHO subsidised the cost of eating out, with a 50% discount Mondays to Wednesdays in August 2020. We exploit th...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Robust ranking of happiness outcomes: a median regression perspective

Ordered probit and logit models have been frequently used to estimate the mean ranking of happiness outcomes (and other ordinal data) across groups. However, it has been recently highlighted that such ranking may not be ...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Economics:

Power outages and firm performance: a hydro-IV approach for a single electricity grid

We estimate the impact of power outages on firm performance using a hydro-instrumental variable strategy which integrates a river flow with a hydropower generation model and an electricity-grid-based distance interpolati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Maternal depression and child human capital: a genetic instrumental-variable approach

We here address the causal relationship between maternal depression and child human capital using UK cohort data. We exploit the conditionally-exogenous variation in mothers? genomes in an instrumental-variable approach,...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Peer Effects and Social Influence in Post-16 Educational Choice

This paper investigates the impact of peers' ability on an individual's post-compulsory educational choices in terms of whether they select an academic route or a vocational route. In order to overcome the common problem...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Business and Economic Statistics:

Poorly measured confounders are more useful on the left than on the right

Researchers frequently test identifying assumptions in regression based research designs (which include e.g. instrumental variables or differences-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the righ...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...

CVER Research Paper

The causal effect of secondary school peers on educational aspirations

This paper uses data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) to investigate how the educational aspirations of secondary school pupils in Year 9 (at age 14) and in Year 11 (at age 16) are influence...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Poorly measured confounders are more useful on the left than on the right

Researchers frequently test identifying assumptions in regression based research designs (which include instrumental variables or difference-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the right hand...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Peer Effects and Social Influence in Post-16 Educational Choice

This paper investigates whether the educational choices that young people make after the completion of their GCSEs (at age 16) are influenced by their peers. More specifically, it takes advantage of the variation in peer...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The labour market impact of refugee waves

Recent research has challenged the consensus that sudden inflows of refugees have little or no impact on natives? wages and employment, claiming instead that there are uniformly large detrimental effects on natives witho...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Returning to returns: revisiting the British education evidence

We revisit the question of what is the rate of return to education in Great Britain. We make two contributions. Firstly, we re-assess the robustness of Harmon and Walker (1995), Oreopoulos (2006) and Devereux and Hart (2...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Decomposing the Impact of Immigration on House Prices

An inflow of immigrants into a region impacts house prices in three ways. For a fixed level of local population, housing demand rises due to the increase in foreign-born population. In addition, immigrants can influence ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The labor market effects of refugee waves: reconciling conflicting results

An influential strand of research has tested for the effects of immigration on natives? wages and employment using exogenous refugee supply shocks as natural experiments. Several studies have reached conflicting conclusi...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...

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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

First-Come First-Served: Identifying the Demand Effect of Immigration Inflows on House Prices

An inflow of immigrants into a region affects house prices in three ways. In the short run, housing demand increases due to the increase in foreign-born population. In the long run, immigrants affect native location deci...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

Union Density and Varieties of Coverage: The Anatomy of Union Wage Effects in Germany

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily co...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

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

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

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

A Researcher's Guide to the Swedish Compulsory School Reform

When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one exampl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Growth and the Quality of Foreign Direct Investment: Is All FDI Equal?

In this paper we distinguish different ?qualities? of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. We use `quality? to mean the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth. However this is difficult to estab...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Long Term Impacts of Compulsory Schooling: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in School Leaving Dates

This paper investigates a unique feature of the English educational system to estimate the causal effect of compulsory schooling on labour market outcomes. We examine school leaving rules that allow for discrete variatio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Agricultural Returns and Conflict: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Policy Intervention Programme in Rwanda

In 1997 Rwanda introduced a re-settlement policy for refugees displaced during previous conflicts. We exploit geographic variation in the speed of implementation of this policy to investigate the impact of conflict-induc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Instrumental Variables for Binary Treatments with Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: A Simple Exposition

This note provides a simple exposition of what IV can and cannot estimate in a model with a binary treatment variable and heterogeneous treatment effects. It shows how linear IV is a misspecification of functional form a...Read more...