Results

Blog

VoxEU:

'Potential capital', working from home, and economic resilience

Janice Eberly, Jonathan Haskel and Paul Mizen estimate the potential capital and labour saved through working from home that would otherwise have been lost during the Covid-19 pandemic....Read more...

Blog

Innovation Growth Lab:

Lessons on designing tech RCTs with SMEs

Capucine Riom, Anna Valero and Juliana Oliveira-Cunha look at how new technology based on artificial intelligence can be used to help small and medium-sized businesses improve productivity....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...

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...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Government policy fails to join the dots on the key challenges of innovation, net zero, and levelling up

Anna Valero writes that funding clean technologies, such as ocean and wind energy, can be a triple win, helping to address climate change, generating growth, and contributing to levelling up. Yet the 2021 Budget failed t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

Research and development is underprovided whenever it creates knowledge spillovers that drive a wedge between its total and private economic returns. Heterogeneity in the intensity of this market failure across technolog...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Minimum wages and the China syndrome: causal evidence from US local labor markets

Exposure to Chinese import competition led to significant manufacturing job losses in the United States. Local labor markets, however, differ significantly in how they fared with respect to manufacturing employment. An i...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

LSE Blogs:

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 impact of healthcare IT on clinical quality, productivity and workers

Adoption of health information and communication technologies ('HICT') has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivit...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...

CEP discussion paper

The diffusion of disruptive technologies

We identify novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls. Our approach enables us to identify and document the diffusion of 29 disruptive technologies across firms and labor mark...Read more...

Blog

LSE blogs:

UK labour shortages and immigration: looking at the evidence

Can the shortages of workers reported by the food and drink sector be solved by making it easier to hire migrants? How will wages in these sectors change? Is there a conflict between short- and long-term fixes? Alan Mann...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Labour market reallocation in the wake of Covid-19

As economies bounce back from Covid-19, our economists question whether the recovery will re-employ all of the workers made redundant during the downturn, and whether they will go back to similar jobs....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

VoxEU:

How disruptive technologies diffuse

Nicholas Bloom, Tarek Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Josh Lerner, Ahmed Tahoun question how technical progress influences income and wealth inequality in the US and its affects on higher and lower-skilled hiring rates....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technological change and domestic outsourcing

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered dif...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

Beyond income inequality: non-monetary rewards to work

Discussion of income inequality focuses primarily on wages with limited consideration of the non-monetary rewards to work, not least the satisfaction that employees experience in doing their jobs. Andrew Clark, Maria Cot...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

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...

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

Innovation, growth and the transition to net-zero emissions

The climate crisis and the global economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis occur against a background of slowing growth and widening inequalities, which together imply an urgent need for a new environmentally sustainable a...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What is the future of commuting to work?

Around half the UK labour force is currently working from home. Paul Mizen, Nick Bloom, Shivani Taneja analyse survey data suggesting that spending two to three days a week at home is the most common expected working pat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Judge Dread: court severity, repossession risk and demand in mortgage and housing markets

We study the impact of borrower protection on mortgage and housing demand. We focus on variation in the likelihood that a house is repossessed - conditional on the mortgage being in arrears and taken to court - coming fr...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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization, trade imbalances and labor market adjustment

We study the role of global trade imbalances in shaping the adjustment dynamics in response to trade shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multi-country, multi-sector model of trade with two key ingredient...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Working from home is revolutionising the UK labour market

Attitudes towards working from home have changed substantially since the start of the pandemic. This column discusses the findings from a survey of 5,000 working adults in the UK in January and February 2021, which sugge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gravity with granularity

We evaluate the consequences of oligopolistic behavior for the estimation of gravity equations for trade flows. With oligopolistic competition, firm-level gravity equations based on a standard CES demand framework need t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Non-compete agreements, wages and efficiency: theory and evidence from Brazilian football

We propose a model to study non-compete agreements and evaluate their quantitative effects. We explore an exogenous policy change that removed non-compete clauses in the market for Brazilian footballers, the Pele Act of ...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...

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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Increasing support for clean innovation: a win-win-win strategy?

Political support for government spending to deal with the economic aftermath of the COVID pandemic has grown. It is now greater than during the 2008 financial crisis, and 'build back better' pledges have multiplied. Ral...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

New incentives for businesses to train their employees are needed for economic recovery from COVID-19

The need to retrain or upskill the workforce has become ever more urgent due to sharp changes in skills demand induced by the pandemic, write Jiaqi Li, Guglielmo Ventura and Anna Valero....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...

Blog

Institute for the Future of Work:

The impact of Covid-19 on technology adoption

Anna Valero and Professor John Van Reenen examine the evidence on technology adoption through the pandemic and what it means for the UK's future of work and productivity crisis. New evidence offers a basis for guarded te...Read more...

Journal article

ILR Review:

Monopsony in Labor Markets: A Review

Researchers’ interest in monopsony has increased in recent years. This article reviews the accumulating evidence that employers have considerable monopsony power. It summarizes the application of this idea to explaining ...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...

Blog

FE Week:

Why urgent support is needed to address UK skills deficit

New incentives are needed for businesses to train their employees for a post-Covid world, writes Guglielmo Ventura....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The UK's great demand and supply recession

We revisit UK’s poor productivity performance since the Great Recession by means of both a suitable theoretical framework and firm-level prices and quantities data for detailed products allowing us to both measure demand...Read more...

Blog

The State of Working Britain:

Long-Term Unemployment and the Covid Downturn

With the first signs of rising unemployment under the crisis are beginning to ripple through the labour market, Jonathan Wadsworth examines trends in employment against unemployment, the chances of finding work among tho...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Work, care, and gender across UK lockdowns

A growing body of research is making clear the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across gender. This column explores what the likely implications of a second lockdown in the UK are for gender equality at work and i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pandemics, global supply chains and local labor demand: evidence from 100 million posted jobs in China

This paper studies how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected labor demand, using over 100 million posted jobs on one of the largest online platforms in China. Our data reveal that the number of newly posted jobs within the ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How leading economists view antitrust in the digital economy

US and European experts discuss internet giants, and Google's dominance of search and operating practices, writes Romesh Vaitilingam...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. We evaluate the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) – the world’s fir...Read more...

Blog

State of Working Britain Blog:

1 Million Missing Immigrants (And 1.2 Million More UK-Born)

Jonathan Wadsworth examines the Labour Force Survey, highlighting the strange case of a rapid fall of around 750,000 in the immigrant population of working age over the last year contained in the latest ONS labour market...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

How lockdowns have reversed traditional gender roles in some UK households and further entrenched them in others

Claudia Hupkau and Barbara Petrongolo discuss what the likely implications of a second lockdown are for gender equality at work and in the home....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...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Does light touch cluster policy work? Evaluating the tech city programme

Cluster policies are popular with policymakers, but we know surprisingly little about their effectiveness. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a flagship UK technology cluster programme that uses ‘light touch’, mar...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...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Does light touch cluster policy work? Evaluating the tech city programme

Cluster policies are popular with policymakers, but we know surprisingly little about their effectiveness. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a flagship UK technology cluster programme that uses ‘light touch’, mar...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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

COVID has forced many firms to innovate, with possible lasting impacts

A survey reveals greater UK innovation rates than what we might have expected in the absence of a pandemic, write Capucine Riom and Anna Valero....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements: a cross-country perspective on the changing composition of jobs

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and geography

This paper reviews recent research on geography and trade. One of the key empirical findings over the last decade has been the role of geography in shaping the distributional consequences of trade. One of the major theor...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...

Journal article

History of the Family: Forthcoming

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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Dream jobs: managers in internationally active firms have higher lifetime wages

People at managerial level in international companies accumulate strong experience that is useful also in other firms, write Giordano Mion, Luca David Opromolla, and Gianmarco Ottaviano....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...

CEP occasional paper

Preserving job matches during the Covid-19 pandemic: firm-level evidence on the role of government aid

We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and government policies on firms’ aid takeup, layoff and furlough decisions. We collect new survey data for 10,642 small, medium and large Danish firms, and match to governm...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

Labour Economics:

Gender gaps and the structure of local labor markets

In this paper we discuss some strands of the recent literature on the evolution of gender gaps and their driving forces. We will revisit key stylized facts about gender gaps in employment and wages in a few high-income c...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...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:

Comments on "labor market trends and the changing value of time"

The last century was characterized by a well-documented marked increase in income inequality in the US (see Alvaredo et al., 2018, among many others), which fostered a vast debate among academics and policy makers about ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19 blog:

How a job guarantee scheme can avoid the slide into long-term unemployment

Even if COVID-19 infection rates dwindle, it is now clear that the economy is unlikely to bounce back quickly. This raises the spectre of long-term unemployment. Richard Layard (LSE) explains how the government could dra...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...

Journal article

Heliyon:

Estimating the impact of the Internet of Things on productivity in Europe

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to interconnected devices and objects that collect and transmit data via the Internet. The IoT is an evolving technology, promising to revolutionise industries, but also demanding far-...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A survey of gender gaps through the lens of the industry structure and local labor markets

In this paper we discuss some strands of the recent literature on the evolution of gender gaps and their driving forces. We will revisit key stylized facts about gender gaps in employment and wages in a few high-income c...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

COVID-19 and gender gaps: Latest evidence and lessons from the UK

The social distancing and lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 crisis has hit service sectors with frequent interactions between consumers and providers which cannot be done from home. At the same time, it has added ed...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the productivity advantage of cities

Ever since Marshall (1890) agglomeration externalities have been viewed as the key factor explaining the existence of cities and their size. However, while the various micro foundations of agglomeration externalities str...Read more...

Journal article

Education Policy Analysis Archives:

Using global observation protocols to inform research on teaching effectiveness and school improvement: Strengths and emerging limitations [Uso de protocolos globais de observação em pesquisas sobre a eficácia do professor e melhoria da escola: Pontos for

An essential feature of many modern teacher observation protocols is their “global” approach to measuring instruction. Global protocols provide a summary evaluation of multiple domains of instruction from observers’ over...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Prepare for large wage cuts if you are younger and work in a small firm

The COVID-19 pandemic is turning into a global recession - probably the biggest drop in economic activity since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This column uses over 3 million earnings observations drawn from more tha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor demand in the past, present and future

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. The...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief...Swings and silicon roundabouts: does cluster policy work?

Despite scepticism among researchers, policies to promote geographical clusters of firms in the same sector remain popular. Max Nathan evaluates a flagship programme set up a decade ago to accelerate the growth of Tech C...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Technology can benefit a few superstar workers, at the expense of everyone else

The rollout of television provides a natural experiment, creating an opportunity to isolate the impact of a technical disruption on the labour market, writes Felix Koenig....Read more...

Blog

LSE News:

Artificial intelligence could help protect victims of domestic violence

Ria Ivandic finds in the United States, roughly one in four women experience serious intimate partner violence over their lifetimes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The contribution of immigration to local labor market adjustment

The US suffers from persistent local disparities in employment rates, which should in principle be eliminated by population mobility. Can immigration accelerate this process? Remarkably, on average since 1960, new immigr...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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias

Using decadal census data since 1960, I cannot reject the hypothesis that new immigrants crowd out existing residents from US commuting zones and states one-for-one. My estimate accounts explicitly for dynamic local adju...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade, productivity and (mis)allocation

We examine the gains from globalization in the presence of firm heterogeneity and potential resource misallocation. We show theoretically that without distortions, bilateral and export liberalizations increase aggregate ...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Gender diversity in firms

This paper explores the recent efforts by the corporate world and public policy to increase the number of women in leadership positions in the workplace. We review and empirically evaluate the ‘business case’ for gender ...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 discussion paper

Measuring the gains from labor specialization

We estimate the productivity effects of labor specialization using a judicial environment that offers a quasi-experimental setting well suited to this purpose. Judges in this environment are randomly assigned many differ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Structured management: how firms can hire and keep the best people

Firms' decisions about whom to hire and fire have big effects, not only on their own bottom line but also on the functioning of the labour market and the performance of the whole economy. Analysis of Brazilian data by Da...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The heterogeneous impact of market size on innovation: evidence from French firm-level exports

We analyze how demand conditions faced by a firm impacts its innovation decisions. To disentangle the direction of causality between innovation and demand conditions, we construct a firm-level export demand shock which r...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...

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

Does light touch cluster policy work? Evaluating the tech city programme

Despite academic scepticism, cluster policies remain popular with policymakers. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a flagship UK technology cluster programme. I build a simple framework and identify effects using ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does e-commerce reduce traffic congestion? Evidence from Alibaba Single Day shopping event

Traditional retail involves traffic both from warehouses to stores and from consumers to stores. E-commerce cuts intermediate traffic by delivering goods directly from the warehouses to the consumers. Although plenty of ...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

Building a productive workforce: the role of structured management practices

Firms’ hiring and firing decisions affect the entire labor market. Managers often make these decisions, yet the effects of management on labor allocation remains largely unexplored. To study the relationship between a fi...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...

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...

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...

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...

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

Journal of Urban Economics:

Relocation of public sector workers: Evaluating a place-based policy ,

This paper investigates the local labor market impact of a UK relocation initiative – the 2004 Lyons Review. The review resulted in the dispersal of about 25,000 civil service jobs out of London and the South East toward...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...

CEP discussion paper

A tale of comprehensive labor market reforms: evidence from the Italian jobs act

The Italian Jobs Act introduced a subsidy for new hirings as well as a new open ended labor contract based on graded security, with severance payments increasing with tenure, while phasing out the compulsory reinstatemen...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economic Studies:

Carry-along trade

Large multi-product firms dominate international trade flows. This paper documents new facts about multi-product manufacturing exporters that are not easily reconciled with existing multi-product models. Using novel link...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...

CentrePiece article

Europe's transformation after Gutenberg: the impact of new media and competition

Jeremiah Dittmar explores the effects of the printing press and the new forms of competition that accompanied its introduction....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Making smart meters smarter the smart way

We report first results from a large scale randomized control trial of different forms of energy consumption feedback facilitated by smart meters and smart phone feedback apps. Nearly 40,000 customers of a large energy r...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

Journal of Political Economy:

Monopolistic competition and optimum product diversity under firm heterogeneity

Empirical work has drawn attention to the high degree of productivity differences within industries and their role in resource allocation. This paper examines the allocational efficiency of such markets. Productivity dif...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New media and competition: printing and Europe's transformation after Gutenberg

We study the role of book content in economic, religious, and institutional development after the introduction of printing, and the role of competition in determining the amount and content of local printing. We focus on...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The public sector and the misallocation of labor: evidence from a policy experiment in India

State-owned enterprises are often thought to represent a distortion in the labor market, but the implied efficiency losses have not been carefully estimated. This paper presents the first rigorous quantification of the a...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

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...

CEP discussion paper

The contribution of foreign migration to local labor market adjustment

The US suffers from large regional disparities in employment rates which have persisted for many decades. It has been argued that foreign migration offers a remedy: it “greases the wheels” of the labor market by accelera...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor specialization as a source of market frictions

This paper investigates why labor specialization brings additional frictions to the labor market. The intuition is that labor specialized firms rely on complementarity and firm-specific human capital, assigning high valu...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies

Do high search costs affect the labour market outcomes of jobseekers living far away from jobs? I randomly assign transport subsidies to unemployed youth in urban Ethiopia. Treated respondents increase job search intensi...Read more...

Journal article

Small Business Economics:

Entrepreneurship, institutional economics, and economic growth: an ecosystem perspective

We analyze conceptually and in an empirical counterpart the relationship between economic growth, factor inputs, institutions, and entrepreneurship. In particular, we investigate whether entrepreneurship and institutions...Read more...

Journal article

ILR Review:

The Impact of Acquiring Unrestricted Work Authorization on Romanian and Bulgarian Migrants in the United Kingdom

When Romania and Bulgaria (the so-called A2 countries) joined the European Union in 2007, the United Kingdom imposed temporary restrictions on the employment and welfare entitlements of A2 citizens that lasted until Janu...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

The persistence of local joblessness

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. Thes...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Intended versus unintended consequences of migration restriction policies: Evidence from a natural experiment in Indonesia

This article studies the consequences of restrictions to migration at the origin on labor market outcomes and school enrolment in origin communities. Our difference-indifferences specification exploits the differential i...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

Specialization matters in the firm size-wage gap

This study applies the O-ring theory to explain the firm-size wage premium. It focuses on the joint role of the division of labor and employee characteristics. Including the firm heterogeneity of occupations in a standar...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...

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...

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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Interaction of Public and Private Employment: Evidence from a German Government Move

We use the German government move from Bonn to Berlin in 1999 to test competing views about the impact of public employment on private sector activity in a local labor market. A relocated public sector job might create n...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

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 con...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...

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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

The productivity slowdown and the declining labor share: a neoclassical exploration

We explore the possibility that a global productivity slowdown is responsible for the widespread decline in the labor share of national income. In a neoclassical growth model with endogenous human capital accumulation a ...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

American Economic Review:

How Local Are Labor Markets? Evidence from a Spatial Job Search Model

This paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets. Our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas, while preserving tractability. We estimate t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Robot arithmetic: can new technology harm all workers or the average worker?

It is well-established that new technology can cause large changes in relative wages and inequality. But there are also claims, based largely on verbal expositions, that new technology will harm workers on average or eve...Read more...

Journal article

The World Economy:

Service Trade and Occupational Tasks: An Empirical Investigation

Using microdata for Belgium, we investigate the relationship between changes in the task content of production and the rise in the number of service exporters. We show that occupational tasks changes display an extremely...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Housing Allowance and Rents: Evidence from a Stepwise Subsidy Scheme

This paper studies the effect of housing demand subsidies on rents using discontinuities in the Finnish housing allowance system as a quasi-experimental setting. The stepwise dependence of housing allowance on the floor ...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

Research Policy:

The long-term effect of digital innovation on bank performance: An empirical study of SWIFT adoption in financial services

We examine the impact on bank performance of the adoption of SWIFT, a network-based technological infrastructure and set of standards for worldwide interbank telecommunication. We construct a new longitudinal dataset of ...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

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

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...

CEP discussion paper

Fertility and mothers' labor supply: new evidence using time-to-conception

We analyze the impact of children on their mothers' labor market outcomes in the UK. We use time-to-conception of the first child as an exogenous variation in the probability of having more children. We find that having ...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...

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...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Unemployment and Domestic Violence: Theory and Evidence

Does rising unemployment really increase domestic violence as many commentators expect? The contribution of this article is to examine how changes in unemployment affect the incidence of domestic abuse. Theory predicts t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The loss of production work: evidence from quasi-experimental identification of labour demand functions

This paper examines changes in the structure of labour demand in plant-level panel data. I exploit variation in wages across local labour markets induced by the collapse of Finland’s Soviet-dependent industry in the earl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the size distribution of firms: evidence from the German Empire

What is the effect of trade on the size distribution of firms? We collect historical data between 1882 and 1907 from the German Empire to address this question. Our data allow us to match three data sets according to the...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

High-speed rail in China

Encouraging innovation is a perennial policy goal – and one common approach is to promote the adoption of foreign technology. Yatang Lin and colleagues examine the impact of China’s technology transfer policy, which has ...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

Energy Policy:

Competition and norms: a self-defeating combination?

This paper investigates the effects of information feedback mechanisms on electricity and heating usage at a student hall of residence in London. In a randomised control trial, we formulate different treatments such as f...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...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Ill Communication: Technology, distraction & student performance

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we ...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...

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

Journal of Economic Theory:

Assignment reversals: Trade, skill allocation and wage inequality

The allocation of skilled labor across industries shapes inter-industry wage differences and wage inequality. This paper shows the ranking of industries by workforce skill differs between developed and developing countri...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

The Rising Postgraduate Wage Premium

Despite post-college degree holders now making up nearly 15% of the US adult workforce, studies of their labour market performance remain sparse. This is surprising given that they are the most educated group in the labo...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Ill communication: technology, distraction and student performance

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we ...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...

CentrePiece article

Online hiring of offshore workers: the value of intermediaries

‘Old boy networks’ have not been rendered obsolete by modern communications technology. That is one of the conclusions of a study of global online labour markets by Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas. Their researc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Balanced growth despite Uzawa

Evidence for the United States suggests balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and less than unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theore...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a new econometric framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation among the three unrestricted. We do this by systematically ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

International technology transfer and domestic innovation: evidence from the high-speed rail sector in China

How does the transfer of advanced technology spur innovation in developing countries? This paper exploits the large-scale introduction of high-speed railway (HSR) technology into China in 2004 as a natural experiment to ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Trade and Frictional Unemployment in the Global Economy

We develop a multi-country, multi-sector trade model with labor market frictions and equilibrium unemployment. Trade opening leads to a reduction in unemployment if it raises real wages and reallocates labor towards sect...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...

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...

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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Media, markets and institutional Change: evidence from the protestant reformation

This research studies the role of competition in the diffusion of radical ideas and institutional change during the Protestant Reformation. We construct a new measure of religious content in the media using data on all k...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New media, competition and growth: European cities After Gutenberg

This research studies how variations in competition and in media content characterized the use and impact of Gutenberg's printing press technology during the European Renaissance. The research constructs annual firm-leve...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Phone home: should mobiles be banned in schools?

Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy look at the impact of mobile phone bans on pupils' academic achievement in four cities in England....Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Oil: the impact on women's work

Stephan Maurer and Andrei Potlogea explore whether oil-dominated economies are naturally biased against women's labour market participation....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...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Immigration, Housing Discrimination and Employment

We use a new data set on Italy and a novel identification strategy to analyse the relationship between migrants' employment status and the percentage of non-Italians living nearby. Our data contain information at the ver...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

The persistence of local joblessness

Local differences in US employment-population ratios and unemployment rates have persisted over many decades. Using decennial census data from 1950-2010, we investigate the reasons for this. The persistence cannot be exp...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 discussion paper

Ill communication: technology, distraction and student performance

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we ...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...

CEP discussion paper

The future of the German industrial relations model

The paper examines recent evidence on the erosion of the German industrial relations model. Although its coverage has declined, much of this has occurred in smaller and newer establishments, and compared with Britain, it...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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Teachers and performance pay in 2014: first results of a survey

From the autumn of 2014, a new performance pay scheme was introduced for school teachers in England and Wales. It makes pay progression for all teachers dependent upon their performance as evaluated by their line manager...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Napoleonic protectionism: how France's cotton industry gained

Can temporary protection from trade with advanced economies foster the development of ‘infant industries’ in developing countries? Reka Juhasz considers a natural experiment: Napoleon’s wartime blockade of British export...Read more...

Journal article

Water Economics and Policy:

Invention and Diffusion of Water Supply and Water Efficiency Technologies: Insights from a Global Patent Dataset

This paper identifies over 50,000 patents filed worldwide in various water-related technologies between 1990 and 2010, distinguishing between those related to availability (supply) and conservation (demand) technologies....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Landing The First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring

Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries - called outsourcing agencies - have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that age...Read more...

CEP policy analysis

The impact of 'clean innovation' on economic growth: evidence from the transport and energy industries'

Policies on climate change that encourage 'clean innovation' while displacing 'dirty innovation' could have a positive impact on short-term economic growth while avoiding the potentially disastrous reduction in GDP that ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Knowledge Spillovers from Clean and Dirty Technologies

How much should governments subsidize the development of new clean technologies? We use patent citation data to investigate the relative intensity of knowledge spillovers in clean and dirty technologies in two technologi...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

Dynamic Selection: An Idea Flows Theory of Entry, Trade and Growth

This paper develops an idea flows theory of trade and growth with heterogeneous firms. New firms learn from incumbent firms, but the diffusion technology ensures entrants learn not only from frontier technologies, but fr...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

Fueling the Gender Gap? Oil and Women's Labor and Marriage Market Outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of resource-based economic specialization on women's labor market outcomes. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields in the Southern United States coupled with a ...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

In brief - New technology: who wins, who loses?

Technology has transformed the once powerful office of ambassador into a glorified sales position, while nurses, teaching assistants and medical technicians all benefit from the ICT revolution. According to an empirical ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Victorian internet: the trade impact of the transatlantic telegraph

The telegraph was the Victorian equivalent of today’s ‘big data’, helping firms to forecast future demand. Analysing such unique historical ‘experiments’ helps understand how firms and markets respond when new technology...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...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Has ICT polarized skill demand? Evidence from eleven countries over twenty-five years

We test the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) polarize labor markets by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated w...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...

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...

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

The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being

The aim of this paper is to survey the 'hard' evidence on the effects of subjective well-being. In doing so, we complement the evidence on the determinants of well-being by showing that human well-being also affects outc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Model of Aggregate Demand and Unemployment

We present a static model of aggregate demand and unemployment. The economy has a nonproduced good, a produced good, and labor. Product and labor markets have matching frictions. A general equilibrium is a set of prices,...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...

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

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

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

What are the Channels for Technology Sourcing? Panel Data Evidence from German Companies

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effective...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

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 discussion paper

Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Technology Diffusion and Learning On-the-job

This paper develops a theory of technology transfer when technology is embodied in human capital and learning requires on-the-job communication between managers and workers. Patterns of knowledge diffusion depend on wher...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Female Employment and Fertility - The Effects of Rising Female Wages

Increases in female employment and falling fertility rates have often been linked to rising female wages. However, over the last 30 years the US total fertility rate has been fairly stable while female wages have continu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Selection into Trade and Wage Inequality

This paper analyzes the impact of trade integration on wage inequality when there is heterogeneity across both workers and firms. By incorporating labor assignment into the heterogeneous firms literature I develop a mode...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

Accounting for Big City Growth in Low Paid Occupations: Immigration and/or Service Class Consumption

Growth of 'global cities' in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarisation, including growth of low paid service jobs. Though held to be untrue for European cities, at the time, some such growth di...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

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

Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Has China Grown So Fast? The Role of International Technology Transfer

Chinese economic growth has been spectacular in the last 30 years. We investigate the role of International Joint Ventures with Technology Transfer agreements, an understudied area. Technology transfer is the traditional...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Household Effects of Government Spending

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

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Americans do IT better: US multinationals and the productivity miracle

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Preferential Trade Agreements and the Labor Market

Labor market consequences are at the forefront of most debates on the merits of trade liberalization. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the primary form of trade liberalization in most countries, and sever...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

Assignment Reversals: Trade, Skill Allocation and Wage Inequality

Understanding the allocation of skilled labor across industries is necessary to explain inter-industry wage differences and the effect of trade on wages. This paper develops a multi-sector assignment model with both hete...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...

CEP discussion paper

Worktime Regulations and Spousal Labor Supply

We investigate cross-hour effects in spousal labor supply exploiting independent variation in hours worked generated by the introduction of the short workweek in France in the late 1990s. We find that female and male emp...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...

CEP discussion paper

The Minimum Wage and Inequality - The Effects of Education and Technology

While there has been intense debate in the empirical literature about the effects of minimum wages on inequality in the US, its general equilibrium effects have been given little attention. In order to quantify the full ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

From Russia with Love: The Impact of Relocated Firms on Incumbent Survival

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied z...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

Leveraging Monopoly Power by Degrading Interoperability: Theory and Evidence from Computer Markets

When will a monopolist have incentives to leverage his market power in a primary market to foreclose competition in a complementary market by degrading compatibility/interoperability of his products with those of her riv...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...

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 occasional paper

Wage Inequality,Technology and Trade: 21st Century Evidence

This paper describes and explains some of the principal trends in the wage and skill distribution in recent decades. There have been sharp increases in wage inequality across the OECD, beginning with the US and UK at the...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...

CEP discussion paper

School Proximity and Child Labor Evidence from Rurul Tanzania

Is improved school accessibility an effective policy tool for reducing child labor in developing countries? We address this question using micro data from rural Tanzania and a regression strategy that attempts to control...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Communal Responsibility and the Coexistence of Money and Credit Under Anonymous Matching

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps t...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...

CentrePiece article

The shrinking middle

Guy Michaels and colleagues show how new technologies are polarising the labour market, with the middle-skilled losing out most...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...

CEP discussion paper

Explaining Job Polarization in Europe: The Roles of Technology, Globalization and Institutions

This paper shows the employment structure of 16 European countries has been polarizing in recent years with the employment shares of managers, professionals and low-paid personal services workers increasing at the expens...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

Read more...

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

Spreading the Word: Geography, Policy and Knowledge Spillovers

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, we study how geography affects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance up to about 150 miles and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The End of National Models in Employment Relations?

The erosion of a number of national systems of employment relations, and the evidence from large scale workplace surveys has brought attention to the considerable diversity of employment systems within major economies. T...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...

CEP discussion paper

The long-term effect of digital innovation on bank performance: an empirical study of SWIFT adoption in financial services

We examine the impact on bank performance of the adoption of SWIFT, a network-based technological infrastructure for worldwide interbank telecommunication. We construct a new longitudinal dataset of 6,848 banks in 29 cou...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...

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...

CEP discussion paper

Has ICT Polarized Skill Demand? Evidence from Eleven Countries over 25 Years

OECD labor markets have become more “polarized” with employment in the middle of the skill distribution falling relative to the top and (in recent years) also the bottom of the skill distribution. We test the hypothesis ...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...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Can pay regulation kill? Panel data evidence on the effect of labor markets on hospital performance

In many sectors, pay is regulated to be equal across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. When the competitive outside wage is higher than the regulated wage, there are likely to be falls in quality. We exploit pane...Read more...

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...

Journal article

Economica:

The wage impact of trade unions in the UK public and private sectors

There is a growing gap in the union membership wage premium between public and private-sector workers in the United Kingdom. Using the Labour Force Surveys of 1993-2006, the gap between the membership premium in the publ...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

Local Human Capital and Its Impact on Local Employment Chances in Britain

This paper examines how high human capital in a locality is associated with the employment outcomes of individuals. A probit model is used to examine how the employment probability of otherwise similar working age males ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Wage Effects from Changes in Local Human Capital in Britain

This paper examines the wage effects arising from changing local human capital in the labour market areas of Britain. Employing wage regressions, it is found that individuals’ wages are positively associated with changes...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

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 discussion paper

How to Measure Living Standards and Productivity

This paper sets out a general algorithm for calculating true cost-of-living indices or true producer price indices when demand is not homothetic, i.e. when not all expenditure elasticities are equal to one. In principle,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Participation in Organisations: Economic Approaches

Under the auspices of the debate about high performance work systems, it has been suggested that the evidence of positive results is disappointing and that one reason is that there has been a lack of theory. This paper 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

What if Congress Doubled R&D Spending on the Physical Sciences?

Many business, academic, and scientific groups have recommended that the Congress substantially increase R&D spending in the near future. President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative calls for a doubling of spend...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization

Guided by theories of management by exception, we study the impact of Information and Communication Technology on worker and plant manager autonomy and on span of control. We find, using an original dataset of American a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employee Voice and Private Sector Workplace Outcomes in Britain, 1980-2004

Non-union direct voice has replaced union representative voice as the primary avenue for employee voice in the British private sector. This paper provides a framework for examining the relationship between employee voice...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Long-Term Effects of Forced Migration

We study the long-term effects of human displacement using individual level panel data on forced migrants and comparable non-migrants. After World War II, Finland ceded a tenth of its territory to the Soviet Union and re...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...

CEP discussion paper

Trade, Technology Adoption and Wage Inequalities: Theory and Evidence

This paper develops a model of trade that features heterogeneous firms, technology choice and different types of skilled labor in a general equilibrium framework. Its main contribution is to explain the impact of trade i...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

Resurrecting the Participation Margin

This paper considers a real business cycle model with search frictions in the labor market and labor supply which is elastic along the participation margin. Previous authors have found that such models generate counterfa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor Market Reforms, Job Instability, and the Flexibility of the Employment Relationship

We endogenize separation in a search model of the labor market and allow for bargaining over the continuation of employment relationships following productivity shocks to take place under asymmetric information. In such ...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

Can Pay Regulation Kill? Panel Data Evidence on the Effect of Labor Markets on Hospital Performance

Labor market regulation can have harmful unintended consequences. In many markets, especially for public sector workers, pay is regulated to be the same for individuals across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. We...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...

CEP discussion paper

U.S. Labor Market Dynamics Revisited

The picture of U.S. labor market dynamics is opaque. Empirical studies have yielded contradictory findings and debates have emerged regarding their implications. This paper aims at clarifying the picture, which is import...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Information Technology, Organization, and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from Police Departments

We examine how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational change, labor demand, and improved productivity in the public sector using a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. While IT ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Private Ownership, Incentives and Local Development Objectives on University Technology Transfer Performance

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new surv...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

The Evolution of Inequality in Productivity and Wages: Panel Data Evidence

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cell...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

The Division of Labor, Coordination, and the Demand for Information Processing

Since Adam Smith’s time, the division of labor in production has increased significantly, while information processing has become an important part of work. This paper examines whether the need to coordinate an increasin...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

Chain Indices of the Cost of Living and the Path-Dependence Problem: An Empirical Solution

This paper proposes an empirically feasible method for correcting the path-dependence bias of chain indices of the cost of living. Chain indices are discrete approximations to Divisia indices and it is well known that th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Americans Do I.T. Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle

The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity...Read more...

CEP report

Changes in Wage Inequality

We examine trends in wage inequality in the US and other countries over the past four decades. We show that there has been a secular increase in the 90-50 wage differential in the US and the UK since the late 1970s. By c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Seigniorage

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

CEP discussion paper

Information Technology, Organisational Change and Productivity Growth: Evidence from UK Firms

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (?O) using UK firm data. Consistent with the small number of other micro studies we find (a) IT appears to have high retur...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...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment and Hours of Work: The North Atlantic Divide Revisited

I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gross Worker Flows in the Presence of Informal Labor Markets. The Mexican Experience 1987-2002

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representative developing country with a large unregulated of “informal” sector, Mexico. It finds, first, that the formal salaried sector show...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

Competing Technologies in the Database Management Systems Market

In this paper, we study the dynamics of the market for Database Management Systems (DBMS), which is commonly assumed to possess network effects and where there is still some viable competition in our study period, 2000 –...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 discussion paper

Incentives and Invention in Universities

Using data on U.S. universities, we show that universities that give higher royalty shares to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university size, academic quality, research funding and ot...Read more...

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

The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks: Firm Level Estimation and a 9/11 Simulation

Uncertainty appears to vary strongly over time, temporarily rising by up to 200% around major shocks like the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassination of JFK and 9/11. This paper offers the first structural framework to a...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

Superstars and Renaissance Men: Specialization, Market Size and the Income Distribution

A general equilibrium model of individual specialization is presented in which agents trade off the productivity and price implications of producing a narrower range of goods. Agents with highly specific skills turn out ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Factor Price Equality and the Economies of the United States

We develop a methodology for identifying departures from relative factor price equality across regions that is valid under general assumptions about production, markets and factors. Application of this methodology to the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor and the Market Value of the Firm

What role does labor play in a firm’s market value? We explore this question using a production-based asset pricing model with frictions in the adjustment of both capital and labor. We posit that hiring of labor is akin ...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...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating the Performance of the Search and Matching Model

Does the search and matching model fit aggregate U.S. labor market data? While the model has become an important tool of macroeconomic analysis, recent literature pointed to some failures in accounting for the data. This...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Catching a Wave: the Adoption of Voice and High Commitment Workplace Practices in Britain: 1984-1998

In this paper we treat workplace voice and systems of high-commitment human resource management (HCHRM) as technological innovations in order to account for the uneven diffusion patterns observed across establishments. U...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is Poland the Next Spain?

We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sinking the Blues: the Impact of Shop Closing Hours on Labor and Product Markets

There is a growing consensus among economists that extending shop opening hours creates jobs. While this is probably true in deregulating industries, this paper argues there are some deficiencies in the existing hypothes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity Growth and Employment: Theory and Panel Estimates

Theoretical predictions of the effect of TFP growth on employment are ambiguous, and depend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We estimate a model for employment, wages and investment with an ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Financial Globalization and Exchange Rates

The founders of the Bretton Woods System sixty years ago were primarily concerned with orderly exchange rate adjustment in a world economy that was characterized by widespread restrictions on international capital mobili...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How Special is the Special Relationship? Using the Impact of US R&D Spillovers on UK Firms as a Test of Technology Sourcing

How much does US-based R&D benefit other countries and through what mechanisms? We test the 'technology sourcing' hypothesis that foreign research labs located on US soil tap into US R&D spillovers and improve home count...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Crime and economic incentives

We explore the role that economic incentives, particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution, play in determining crime rates. We use data on the police force areas of England and Wales between ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor Market Institutions, Wages and Investment

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relative...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is There a Market for Work Group Servers? Evaluating Market Level Demand Elasticities Using Micro and Macro Models

This paper contains an empirical analysis demand for “work-group” (or low-end) servers. Servers are at the centre of many US and EU anti-trust debates, including the Hewlett-Packard/Compaq merger and investigations into ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Comparative Advantage and Heterogeneous Firms

This paper presents a model of international trade that features heterogeneous firms, relative endowment differences across countries, and consumer taste for variety. The paper demonstrates that firm reactions to trade l...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Evaluating the employment impact of a mandatory job search program

This paper exploits area-based piloting and age-related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program-the New Deal for Young People in the U.K. A central focus is on substitution/displacement ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

We Can Work It Out: the Impact of Technological Change on the Demand for Low Skill Workers

There is little doubt that technology has had the most profound effect on altering the tasks that we humans do in our jobs. Economists have long speculated on how technical change affects both the absolute demand for lab...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Short Job Tenures and Firing Taxes in the Search Theory of Unemployment

This paper studies the effects of firing taxes on the job destruction rate, when probation period - or temporary contract - policies are implemented in an otherwise exogenous job separation search model. It is shown that...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The 'Network Economy' and Models of the Employment Contract: Psychological, Economic and Legal

The emergence of the so-called ¿network economy¿ and the development of project-based work pose a fundamental challenge to established methods of regulating the employment relationship. There appears to be an unsatisfied...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Lousy and Lovely Jobs: the Rising Polarization of Work in Britain

This paper argues that skill-biased technical change has some deficiencies as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market and that a more nuanced view recently proposed by Autor, Levy and Murnane (200...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Product Choice and Product Switching

This paper develops a model of endogenous product selection by firms. The theory is motivated by new evidence we present on the importance of product switching by U.S. manufacturers. Two-thirds of continuing firms change...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Child Labor and the Labor Supply of Other Household Members: Evidence from 1920 America

This paper analyses the effect of child labor on household labor supply using 1920 US Census micro data. The aim of the analysis is to understand who in the household benefits from child labor. In order to identify a sou...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Segmentation, Switching Costs and the Demand for Unionization in Britain

This paper explains why some employees who favor unionization fail to join, and why others who wish to abandon union membership continue paying dues. Our explanation is based on a model where employees incur switching (s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Inequality in Skills Explain Inequality of Earnings Across Advanced Countries?

The distribution of earnings and the distribution of skills vary widely among advanced countries, with the major English-speaking countries, the US, UK, and Canada, having much greater inequality in both earnings and ski...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Factor Price Equalization in the UK?

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region- industry factor quality differences and variation in production technolog...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managerial Ownership and Firm Performance in German Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

This paper studies the effect of managerial ownership on performance and the determinants of managerial ownership for small and medium-sized private companies. We use a panel of around 1300 firms in the German business-r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Minimum Wages and On-the-Job Training

Becker's theory of human capital predicts that minimum wages should reduce training investments for affected workers because they prevent these workers from taking wage cuts necessary to finance training. In contrast, i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology Dissemination and Economic Growth: Some Lessons for the New Economy

This paper attempts to draw lessons for the New Economy from what economists know about technology dissemination and economic growth. It argues that what is most notable about the New Economy is that it is knowledge-driv...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Company Start-Up Costs and Employment

I study the role of company start-up costs for employment performance. The model is search equilibrium with a new concept for firms. Agents have an innate managerial ability and make a career choice to become either mana...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor Pooling, Labor Poaching and Spatial Clustering

When firms cluster in the same local labor market, they face a trade-off between the benefits of labor pooling (i.e., access to workers whose knowledge help reduce costs) and the costs of labor poaching (i.e., loss of so...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Influences on Trade Union Organising Effectiveness in Great Britain

This paper brings together data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, National Survey of Unions and TUC focus on recognition survey to investigate influences on union organising effectiveness. Organising eff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Frustrated Demand for Unionisation: the Case of the United States and Canada Revisited

In this paper we demonstrate that there is a substantial union representation gap in the United States. We arrive at this conclusion by comparing Canadian and American worker responses to questions relating to desired un...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Jobs, Workers and Changes in Earnings Dispersion

The 'fractal' nature of the rise in earnings dispersion is one of its key features and remains a puzzle. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on the causes of changes in earnings dispersion, focusing on the role o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technological Innovation and Performance in the United Kingdom

Over the period since 1970, Britain has improved its relative productivity performance, but there remains a significant gap in market sector productivity between Britain and both Continental Europe and the United States....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade Unions and Industrial Injury in Great Britain

Anecdotal evidence suggests that trade unions succeed in ameliorating workplace health and safety, but no attempt has been made to link specific workplace injury rates with a respective union presence. Relying on WERS98,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

R&D in Developing Countries: What Should Governments Do?

I consider the implications of recent research for R&D policy in developing countries. Typical new growth models, which assume free entry and no strategic behaviour by R&D producers, are less appropriate for policy guida...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Optimal Currency Areas: Why Does the Exchange Rate Regime Matter? (With an Application to UK Membership in EMU)

Microeconomic efficiency and market transparency argue in favour of UK membership in EMU and for Scotland's membership in the UK monetary union and also in EMU. UK seigniorage (government revenues from money issuance) w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mapping the Two Faces of R&D: Productivity Growth in a Panel of OECD Industries

Many writers have claimed that R&D has two 'faces'. In addition to the conventional role of stimulating innovation, R&D enhances technology transfer by improving the ability of firms to learn about advances in the lead...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Multi-Dimensional Nature of Labour Demmand and Skill Biased Technical Change

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technological change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure û number of employee...Read more...