Results

CEP discussion paper

Defense promotion and industrial development

Major economies are rearming, and rearmament is itself industrial policy. I ask whether defense promotion?especially innovation policy?can drive industrial development beyond the defense sector. I synthesize evidence on ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic effects of trade

The existence of aggregate welfare gains from trade is one of the classic insights from international economics. However, these conventional welfare gains are static, in the sense that they take existing factor supplies ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Place-based industrial policies in the long run

There is growing evidence that place-based industrial policies lead to positive economic effects. This column analyses the 'Million-Rouble Plants' programme of the 1950s when the Soviet Union helped China build state-of-...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

Ports, technology and inter-city trade: the economics and geopolitics of evolving maritime transport networks

Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and ship- ping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granula...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Ports, technology and inter-city trade: the economics and geopolitics of evolving maritime transport networks

Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and shipping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granular ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Brexit has been an economic failure: here?s the evidence

Putting up trade barriers has made the UK poorer...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Climate Change:

The environmental impact of multinational firms in Africa

Whereas environmental conditions are improving in many developed countries, environmental degradation is still widespread. Multinational enterprises could play a central role in solving or fuelling these global environme...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

When and why political leaders polarise rhetoric: Evidence from Twitter/X

Standard theories of electoral competition predict that politicians should converge toward the centre as elections approach. This column challenges this prediction, using 3.4 million tweets from 367 political leaders acr...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Making the invisible hand visible: managers and the allocation of workers to jobs

Why do managers matter for firm performance? This article provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cocaine goes bananas: global spillovers from an illicit supply shock

We study how a sharp expansion in Colombian cocaine production propagated internationally through global trade networks, generating substantial social costs. In Colombia, the production surge increased homicide rates by ...Read more...

Journal article

Spatial Economic Analysis:

Digital network centrality and the structure of goods trade

This paper studies how digital infrastructure is associated with the spatial structure of international trade in goods. We embed data availability into a structural gravity framework, conceptualising it as an information...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Digital network centrality and the structure of goods trade

This paper studies how digital infrastructure is associated with the spatial structure of international trade in goods. We embed data availability into a structural gravity framework, conceptualizing it as an information...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exchange-rate pass-through and invoicing currency choice in international production networks

We study exchange-rate pass-through and currency choice in international transactions, focusing on bilateral bargaining power in relationships between domestic buyers and foreign suppliers. Using detailed transaction-lev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economics of architecture

We illustrate the coordination problem in the provision of distinctive architectural design that arises from design externalities within a quantitative model. To quantify the model, we conduct a quantitative review of a ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Innovation union: costs and benefits of innovation policy coordination

What is the scope for international cooperation in innovation policy in economies closely integrated via trade? We address this question by building a two-region innovation-driven growth model with endogenous technology ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Deglobalisation in disguise?

Brexit means that UK exporters of services now face more red tape and fewer opportunities....Read more...

Journal article

International Economics:

Reassessing EU comparative advantage: the role of technology

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

Chapter

Immigration, diversity and innovation in cities and regions

in A Research Agenda for Migration and Innovation

This chapter investigates the interplay between immigrant diversity and innovation, emphasizing the urban and regional dimensions where these effects are most pronounced. Cities and urban areas are pivotal to the generat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Private highs: investigating university overmatch among students from elite schools

Inequality in elite college attendance is a key driver of intergenerational mobility. This paper shifts the focus upstream to examine how elite high school attendance - specifically, enrollment in UK private, fee-paying ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

The making of civic virtues: a school-based experiment in three countries

This paper shows that schools can foster the transmission of civic virtues by helping students to develop concrete, democratically chosen, collective projects. We draw on a RCT implemented in 200 middle schools in three ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The impact of the 2025 US tariff announcements on UK firms

In the first half of 2025, the US and some of its trading partners announced significant changes to import tariffs. This column uses newly designed questions to study the impact of these changes on UK firms and to assess...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

An alliance for open trade: How to counter Trump's tariffs

The US administration's latest threat to impose sweeping new tariffs on many of its closest allies signals a renewed embrace of aggressive unilateralism and misunderstood economics. This column argues that the only effec...Read more...

Blog

UK in a Changing Europe:

Deglobalisation in disguise?

Shania Bhalotia, Swati Dhingra and Danyal Arnold explain their study on the effect of Brexit on the UK's ability to export services abroad. They argue that exporters now face higher trade costs, more red tape and fewer o...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The battle for trade currency dominance: The dollar vs the renminbi in Argentina

The US dollar has traditionally dominated the invoicing of international trade. But could other currencies one day replace it? This column examines a unique policy experiment in Argentina in 2023. Amid a severe dollar sh...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Export strength does not equal tech strength: Rethinking EU comparative advantage

Amid geopolitical shocks, the EU is revisiting its industrial strategy. However, traditional metrics often paint a misleading picture of Europe's underlying strength. This column uses a new approach to measure the EU's r...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

How the 2018/19 US tariffs against China boosted exports and employment in Mexico

In 2018 and 2019, the US administration hiked tariffs on imports from China. This column shows that imports from Mexico partly filled the gap, leading to an export and employment surge in Mexico. Using highly disaggregat...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The 2025 trade war: Dynamic impacts across US states and the global economy

In 2025, the US government announced a series of tariff increases targeting major trading partners, including Canada, China, and Mexico. This column estimates the economic consequences of these proposed tariffs to the US...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Bridging barriers: how Covid-19 changed racial diversity in economics seminars

In this paper, new facts are documented on the racial distribution of seminar speakers in economics. From a sample of 270 institutions, I determined that before the Covid-19 pandemic, 82.5% of seminars were given by Whit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teaching happiness (economics) in your dismal-science courses

This paper discusses ideas for incorporating the study of happiness and other measures of self-reported or subjective well-being (SWB) into undergraduate economics courses. We begin by motivating why students of economic...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Deep integration and trade: UK firms in the wake of Brexit

How does dismantling deep integration affect international trade? This column uses firm-level customs data to study the impact of Brexit on UK goods trade. The authors find that in the short term, exit from the Single Ma...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Fighting climate change: international attitudes toward climate policies

This paper explores global perceptions and understanding of climate change and policies, examining factors that influence support for climate action and the impact of different types of information. We conduct large-scal...Read more...

Journal article

LSE Public Policy Review:

Explaining variation in child penalties: the role of gender norms and policies

This paper contributes to understanding global variation in child and marriage penalties by focusing on the role of patriarchal control, gender norms, and public policies. We introduce a new measure of gender norms, the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating transport improvements in spatial equilibrium

The recent development of quantitative urban models provides a new set of tools for evaluating transport improvements. Conventional cost-benefit analyses are typically undertaken in partial equilibrium. In contrast, quan...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Daniel Kahneman: a legacy

The late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman had a long association with CEP. At an LSE event, Richard Layard, Gillian Tett and Paul Dolan discussed how his work influenced psychology, economics and society ? and their experi...Read more...

Journal article

Small Business Economics :

Realizing expectations? High-impact entrepreneurship across countries

Comparative international entrepreneurship research has often used measures of high-growth expectations entrepreneurship to proxy for the construct of high-impact entrepreneurship. We revisit this practice by assessing t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Paper tiger? Chinese science and home bias in citations

We investigate the phenomenon of home bias in scientific citations, where researchers disproportionately cite work from their own country. We develop a benchmark for expected citations based on the relative size of count...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

What impact have trade sanctions had on Russia? (Podcast)

Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. How effective have the trade sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022 been? Politically, they were comprehensive and quick. But anecdotal reporting has suggested that Russian firms that w...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

A practical guide to shift-share instruments

A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Do carbon offsets offset carbon?

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies and use it to provide systematic evidence of the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism - the world's largest carbon offs...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Five facts about MPCs: evidence from a randomized experiment

We present five facts from an experiment on the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of transitory transfers: (1) the one-month MPC on a cash-like transfer is 23 percent; (2) it is substantially higher (61 percent) o...Read more...

Chapter

Crime and the labor market

in Handbook of Labor Economics

The economics of crime has emerged as a critical field over the past 30 years, with economists increasingly exploring the causes and consequences of criminal behavior. This chapter surveys key contributions and developme...Read more...

Journal article

Canadian Journal of Economics:

Regional specialization: from the geography of industries to the geography of jobs

Our analysis begins with an empirical investigation of how employment concentration in industries and occupations across United States regions has changed over time, and how regional specialization has changed. Results ...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Ethnic minority and migrant pay gaps over the life-cycle

It is well-known that ethnic minority and migrant workers have lower average pay than the White UK-born workforce. However, we know much less about how these gaps vary over the life-cycle because of data limitations. We ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Wellbeing policy: what lessons from the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman?

The late Daniel Kahneman was awarded the economics Nobel Prize in 2002 for influential research on how people make decisions. His work on wellbeing has also had wide impact, including on what official statistics measure ...Read more...

Journal article

PloS ONE:

Agglomeration costs limit sustainable innovation in cities in developing economies

Theory and evidence from developed economies suggests that innovation activities benefit from agglomeration economies associated with urban economic density. However, despite the fact that eighteen of the world?s top twe...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Globalization and conflicts: the good, the bad, and the ugly of corporations in Africa

Using a novel georeferenced datataset on the affiliates and headquarters of multinational enterprises between 2007 and 2018 together with georeferenced conflict data for the African continent, this work establishes a cau...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantitative urban economics

This paper reviews recent quantitative urban models. These models are sufficiently rich to capture observed features of the data, such as many asymmetric locations and a rich geography of the transport network. Yet these...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial economics

This paper reviews recent research in spatial economics. The field of spatial economics is concerned with the determinants and effects of the location of economic activity in geographic space. It analyses how geographica...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact of Social Sciences:

What makes the child penalty in academia different?

Women are underrepresented in senior academic positions in economics. Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen assess the impact of having children on men and women's career trajectories and suggest how the sector can adapt....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Crime and the labor market

The economics of crime has emerged as a critical field over the past 30 years, with economists increasingly exploring the causes and consequences of criminal behavior. This chapter surveys key contributions and developme...Read more...

CentrePiece article

in brief... Designing carbon markets that deliver change

Ever since the European Union created its market-based carbon policy, governments and businesses have been keen to assess its impact. Jonathan Colmer, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls and Ulrich Wagner explain why analysing ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics:

International friends and enemies

We examine whether, as countries become more economically dependent on a trade partner, they realign politically toward that trade partner. We use network measures of economic exposure to foreign productivity growth deri...Read more...

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...

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...

Blog

Centre for cities:

City Talks: Why we are seeing a boom in urban economics research (Podcast)

We are constantly finding out more about where people live and work, how people move around, where businesses choose to locate, and where people spend their money - all of which adds more depth to our picture of cities. ...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 discussion paper

Trade and the end of antiquity

What caused the end of antiquity, the shift of economic activity away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe? We assemble a large database of coin flows between the 4th and 10th century and use it to document the...Read more...

Blog

Handbook of Labor Economics:

Handbook Talk with Stephen Machin: How does crime impact the economy and society? (Podcast)

In this podcast episode dedicated to the new edition of the Handbook of Labor Economics, Professor from the London School of Economics discusses the recent advances in the Economics of Crime. What are the economic con...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brexit and investment

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

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Personnel management and school productivity: evidence from India

This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report five main results. First, management quality in public schools is low, and -2 standard deviations below high-income countries with ...Read more...

Journal article

Critical Sociology:

A popular backlash against globalization?

Is there a popular backlash against globalization? When did it start and in which forms? What do we know about its causes? We address these questions in the context of advanced democracies. We see the `globalization back...Read more...

Journal article

Nature:

Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance

Working from home has become standard for employees with a university degree. The most common scheme, which has been adopted by around 100 million employees in Europe and North America, is a hybrid schedule, in which ind...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Mafias and Firms (Podcast)

Which firms are infiltrated by organised crime, and why? We know that organised crime has links to some firms in the legal economy. But how big is this infiltration, and what do they gain from it? Rocco Macchiavello tell...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...

CEP discussion paper

Putting quantitative models to the test: an application to Trump's trade war

The primary motivation behind quantitative modeling in international trade and many other fields is to shed light on the economic consequences of policy changes. To help assess and potentially strengthen the credibility ...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The linear algebra of economic geography models

We provide sufficient statistics for nominal and real wage exposure to productivity shocks in a constant elasticity economic geography model. These exposure measures summarize the first-order general equilibrium elastici...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

The organizational economics of school chains

We use the insights of firms' organizational economics to study school chains' organization. We match information on decentralization of activities for approximately 400 chains and 2,000 schools in England to student and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

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 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...

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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why representation matters in the economics profession

What prompts someone to become an economist? How important is representation in inspiring the next generation of black economists? And how positive should women economists be about the future? Felicia Odamtten, an econom...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The 'child penalty' creates most of the gender earnings gaps in rich countries

After having children, women tend to change their working hours and wage rates, and even transition to new jobs. This phenomenon, known as the child penalty, explains the bulk of the gender earnings gap in developed coun...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

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...

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

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...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Remote talks: changes to economics seminars during Covid-19

This paper analyzes the consequences of the change in the presentation mode of economics seminars triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The composition of seminar speakers changed significantly. The share of seminars held ...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

Parenthood and academic career trajectories

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

CEP discussion paper

Neoclassical growth in an interdependent world

We generalize the closed-economy neoclassical growth model (CNGM) to allow for costly goods trade and capital flows with imperfect substitutability between countries. We develop a tractable, multi-country, quantitative m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exporting ideas: knowledge flows from expanding trade in goods

We examine the effect of entry by French firms into a new export market on the dynamics of their patents' citations received from that destination. Applying a difference-in-differences identification strategy with a stag...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The skyscraper revolution: global economic development and land savings

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17,...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

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...

Journal article

Journal of International Business Studies:

Integrating host-country political heterogeneity into MNE-state bargaining: insights from international political economy

The international business (IB) literature has emphasised the heterogeneity of firm strategies in shaping MNE-state bargaining, but largely ignored the heterogeneity of states. In contrast, the international political ec...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

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

LSE Impact of Social Sciences:

New approaches to economics research are reshaping how we understand and respond to gender stereotypes

New ways of analysing data from images and text are being used by economists to study discrimination in the labour market. A recent workshop, hosted by the Centre for Economic Performance and the Department of Social Pol...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

CentrePiece article

Wellbeing: science and policy

What produces a happy society and a happy life? In the first textbook on wellbeing, Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve explain how wellbeing can be measured, what causes it and how it can be improved. They conclude ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What did Adam Smith think - and why does it matter today?

This year is the tercentenary of Adam Smith - 300 years since the birth of the man widely considered to be the father of economics. Jesse Norman MP, author of Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It Matters, talks to Rom...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

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

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

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Globalization and pandemics

We provide theory and evidence on the relationship between globalization and pandemics. Business travel facilitates trade and travel leads to human interactions that transmit disease. Trade-motivated travel generates an ...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Global value chains and domestic innovation

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

Book

Wellbeing: Science and Policy

What produces a happy society and a happy life? Thanks to the new science of wellbeing, we can now answer this question using state-of-the-art empirical evidence. This transforms our ability to base our decisions on the ...Read more...

Journal article

Applied Energy:

Breaking it down: a techno-economic assessment of the impact of battery pack design on disassembly costs

The electrification of the transport sector is a critical part of the net-zero transition. The mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) powered by lithium-ion batteries in the coming decade will inevitably lead to a larg...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economics of cities: from theory to data

Economic activity is highly unevenly distributed within cities, as reflected in the concentration of economic functions in specific locations, such as finance in the Square Mile in London. The extent to which this concen...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Responsible sourcing: Theory and evidence from Costa Rica

There is growing pressure on multinational enterprises to implement 'responsible sourcing' requirements for their suppliers in low- and middle-income countries. These include minimum standards on working conditions, such...Read more...

Journal article

Ecological Economics:

The environmental cost of the international job market for economists

We provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the recruitment system in the economics profession, known as the "international job market for economists". Each year, most graduating PhDs seeking jobs in academia, ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Environmental costs of the global job market for economists

Each year, the international job market for economists involves more than 1,000 candidates and several hundred recruiters from around the world meeting for short pre-screening interviews at annual congresses in Europe an...Read more...