Results

CEP occasional paper

CEP wellbeing coefficient database

Wellbeing cost-benefit analysis requires credible estimates of how much specific life circumstances change subjective wellbeing. This paper documents and contextualises a compendium of 123 such estimates, drawn from 19 d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What is the public?s social welfare function?

Optimal public policy requires a social welfare function defined over individual utilities. While there is substantial research on income-based social welfare functions, no published study has directly elicited public pr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Is it possible to raise national happiness?

We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Criminal career trajectories

This study analyzes criminal career trajectories using a unique administrative dataset of 230,578 individuals arrested and over 620,000 criminal offenses recorded by Greater Manchester Police between 2008 and 2019. Movin...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Human Behaviour:

Why single-item measures of wellbeing are best

We argue that individual wellbeing is best captured by single self-reports of one's overall quality of life. This approach is direct, efficient, globally comparable and distinguishes wellbeing from what might explain it....Read more...

Journal article

Strategy Science:

Strategic confusopoly: evidence from the UK mobile telecommunications market

Can entire markets strategically confuse consumers to raise market prices? Using a detailed data set covering virtually all mobile phone tariffs and their handsets in the United Kingdom between January 2010 and September...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Mapping digital businesses with big data: some early findings from the UK

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT industries. Researchers and policymakers thus need a clear picture of digital businesses, but conventional datasets and typologies tend to lag real-world change. We ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Monopsony and employer misoptimization explain why wages bunch at round numbers

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks o...Read more...

Journal article

Social Science & Medicine:

Passing on the flame: Do mega sports events promote health behaviours?

To justify billion-dollar public expenditures on mega sports events, proponents often suggest lasting improvements in health behaviours among the general public. To estimate the returns to health behaviours from hosting ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Willingness to pay for workplace amenities

We develop a revealed preference approach to measure the value of workplace amenities by analyzing how variation in non-wage job attributes affects excess mass in the earnings distribution at budget discontinuities. The ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth :

What makes a satisfying life? Prediction and interpretation with machine-learning algorithms

Machine Learning (ML) methods are increasingly being used across a variety of fields and have led to the discovery of intricate relationships between variables. We here apply ML methods to predict and interpret life sati...Read more...

Blog

LSE Euro PP:

A new measure of quality of life explains why people like living in bigger cities

People like to live in certain places, even when higher wages are on offer elsewhere. Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel show that once you take into account people's preferences, large cities o...Read more...

Chapter

WELLBY

in Elgar Encyclopedia of Behavioural and Experimental Economics

The WELLBY is a measure of individual subjective wellbeing, as judged by individuals themselves, capturing both the quality of life and the length of life. We outline its use for measuring social progress and for social ...Read more...

Blog

Lives well lived:

Richard Layard: the science of wellbeing (podcast)

Richard Layard is a British Labour Economist, a member of the House of Lords, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report. Layard highlights the role of life satisfaction and wellbeing in government policy, and the impo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is it possible to raise national happiness?

We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective a...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Five facts about MPCs: evidence from a randomized experiment

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

CEP discussion paper

Measuring quality of life under spatial frictions

Using a quantitative spatial model as a data-generating process, we explore how spatial frictions affect the measurement of quality of life. We find that under a canonical parameterization, mobility frictions - generated...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Happy to help: welfare effects of a nationwide volunteering programme

We study the wellbeing returns from volunteering in England's National Health Service (NHS) Volunteer Responders, set up in response to Covid-19. Using linked survey and administrative data, we exploit the oversubscripti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

New venture creation: innovativeness, speed-to-breakeven and revenue tradeoffs

We present a Schumpeterian growth model with new venture creation, under uncertainty, which explains the tradeoff between speed-to-breakeven, revenue-at-breakeven and relates this to the level of innovation. We then expl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Valuing consumption services as technology transforms accessibility: Evidence from Beijing

Home delivery reduced the value of cities as locations to access variety in durable consumption goods. Food delivery services (FDS) are doing the same for restaurants. Home-streaming of sports or home-delivered restauran...Read more...

Chapter

Individual wellbeing and cortisol

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

The variety and the number of ways of measuring individual wellbeing has increased over the past two decades. In addition to all self-reported measures, researchers also consider a wide variety of objectively-measured in...Read more...

Journal article

Review of World Economics:

Curse or blessing? multinational corporations and labor market outcomes in Africa

Do multinational enterprises create local job opportunities in developing countries? We address this question in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa by combining information on domestic and foreign multinationals? affiliat...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Personnel management and school productivity: evidence from India

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

Journal article

Child Indicators Research:

Economic development and adolescent wellbeing in 139 countries

There is a positive association between the level of economic development and national levels of overall life satisfaction (OLS) in the adult population, with decreasing marginal returns. However, research shows no assoc...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Social restrictions, leisure and well-being

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

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association :

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

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

CEP discussion paper

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

Mental health problems impose significant costs, yet healthcare systems of-ten overlook them. We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a nationwide-scaled mental health service in England for treating...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How much is your time worth?

Wages indicate how much people want for their time at work, but how can we find out what value they place on time spent doing other things? Christian Krekel and George MacKerron analyse over two million responses to a sm...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Population Economics:

Teleworking and life satisfaction during Covid-19: the importance of family structure

We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy :

Local retail prices, product variety, and neighborhood change

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-ba...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating the longevity of electric vehicles: what do 300 million MOT test results tell us?

Knowing how long the average vehicle remains roadworthy before being scrapped is a crucial input into life cycle assessment (LCA) and total cost of ownership (TCO) studies of different vehicle powertrains. This study lev...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review :

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

New approaches to measuring welfare

Economics has traditionally understood 'welfare' (what makes a life go well) as the satisfaction of preference. This conceptualisation of welfare is typically measured using revealed preferences, proxied through income a...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Estimating students' valuation for college experiences

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

Journal article

Information Technology & People:

Well-being and working from home during Covid-19

The authors track the well-being of individuals across five European countries during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and relate their well-being to working from home. The authors also cons...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Back to Edgeworth? Estimating the value of time using hedonic experiences

Following early economist Francis Y. Edgeworth's proposal to measure people's hedonic experiences as they go about their daily lives, we use a smartphone app that surveyed a panel of 30; 928 individuals UK-wide over seve...Read more...

Journal article

Scientific Reports:

Happiness predicts compliance with preventive health behaviours during Covid-19 lockdowns

To combat the public health crisis of Covid-19, governments and public health officials have been asking individuals to substantially change their behaviours for prolonged periods of time. Are happier people more willing...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

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

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

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization :

Should bads be inflicted all at once, like Machiavelli said? Evidence from life-satisfaction data

Is wellbeing, measured by life satisfaction, higher if the same number of negative events is spread out rather than bunched in time? Is it better if positive events are spread out or bunched? We answer these questions em...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics:

Gender, loneliness and happiness during Covid-19

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 p...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Tracking uncertainty in a rapidly changing global economic outlook

Tracking uncertainty at a high frequency is useful in the context of the multiple shocks that have hit the global economy over the past years and to disentangle the sources of uncertainty. This column presents a new mont...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The spillover effect of services offshoring on local labour markets

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

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization :

Occupational status and life satisfaction in the UK: the miserable middle?

We use British panel data to explore the link between occupational status and life satisfaction. We find puzzling evidence for men of a U-shaped relationship in cross-section data: employees in medium-status occupations ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Teacher effectiveness and classroom composition: understanding match effects in the classroom

This paper provides evidence of match effects in the teacher labour market by considering how teacher effectiveness varies by classroom composition. We combine random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization:

Occupational prestige and life satisfaction in the UK: the miserable middle?

We use British panel data to explore the link between occupational status and life satisfaction. We find puzzling evidence for men of a U-shaped relationship in cross-section data: employees in medium-status occupations ...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Communications:

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

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

CEP discussion paper

What makes a satisfying life? Prediction and interpretation with machine-learning algorithms

Machine Learning (ML) methods are increasingly being used across a variety of fields and have led to the discovery of intricate relationships between variables. We here apply ML methods to predict and interpret life sati...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Income and Wealth:

Pandemic policy and life satisfaction in Europe

We use data from the COME-HERE longitudinal survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction in France, Germany, Italy, Spain an...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Why wellbeing should be the goal of policy

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

Journal article

Land Economics:

Urban land use fragmentation and human wellbeing

We study how land use fragmentation affects the life satisfaction of city dwellers. To this end, we calculate fragmentation metrics based on exact geographical coordinates of land use from the European Urban Atlas and of...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happy to help: NHS volunteering in Covid-19 times

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

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

The welfare consequences of centralization: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland

Many countries are reallocating tasks and powers to more central levels of government. To identify centralization's welfare effects, I use a difference-in-differences design that relies on time and cross-cantonal variati...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Education and management practices

The empirical management literature has found that the education of both managers and the workforce more generally appears to be an important driver of better management practices. This article sets out how such relation...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

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

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

CEP discussion paper

Happy to help: welfare effects of a nationwide volunteering programme

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

Journal article

The Lancet Public Health :

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

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

Journal article

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin:

Inequality and social rank: income increases buy more life satisfaction in more equal countries

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

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

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 causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, ...Read more...

Journal article

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research:

The age U-shape in Europe: the protective role of partnership

In this study, we ask whether the U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age is flatter for individuals who are partnered. An analysis of cross-sectional EU-SILC data indicates that the decline in life satis...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We h...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

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

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

CEP discussion paper

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

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

CEP discussion paper

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia...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...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

What is the meaning of (statistical) life? Benefit-cost analysis in the time of Covid-19

Efforts to support public policy decisions need to be conducted carefully and thoughtfully. Recent efforts to estimate the social benefits of reductions in mortality risks associated with COVID-19 interventions are likel...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Gender norms, fairness and relative working hours within households

Using data in the United States, UK and Germany, we show that women whose working hours exceed those of their male partners report lower life satisfaction on average. By contrast, men do not report lower life satisfactio...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

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

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: a response to the responses

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

CEP occasional paper

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

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

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Journal article

Regional Studies:

Creative differences? Measuring creative economy employment in the United States and the UK

This paper compares the creative economies of the US and the UK regions and nations using high-quality administrative microdata spanning the period 2011?13. The creative industries are highly urbanized in both countries....Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

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 either too toug...Read more...

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Measuring aggregate price indices with taste shocks: theory and evidence for CES preferences

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

CEP discussion paper

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

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

Journal article

Social History:

Female entrepreneurship: business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851?1911

This article offers a new perspective on what it meant to be a business proprietor in Victorian Britain. Based on individual census records, it provides an overview of the full population of female business proprietors i...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

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

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

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Quantifying the intangible impact of the Olympics using subjective well-being data

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in Lond...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Transportation:

Quantifying wider economic impacts of agglomeration for transport appraisal: existing evidence and future directions

The Authors This paper is concerned with the Wider Economic Impacts (WEIs) of transport improvements that arise via scale economies of agglomeration. It reviews the background theory and empirical evidence on agglomerati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the intangible impact of the Olympics using subjective well-being data

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in Lond...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Who got the Brexit blues? The effect of Brexit on subjective Wellbeing in the UK

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

CentrePiece article

Employee wellbeing: the impact on productivity and firm performance

Does having happier staff mean higher productivity and improvements in companies' bottom line? A study of over 1.8 million employees across 73 countries by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve detects a...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...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (?nature?) versus environment (?nurture?). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million invento...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The economic effects of density: a synthesis

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

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

Employee wellbeing, productivity and firm performance

Does higher employee wellbeing lead to higher productivity, and, ultimately, to tangible benefits to the bottom line of businesses? We survey the evidence and study this question in a meta-analysis of 339 independent res...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...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

The interconnections between services and goods trade at the firm-level

In this paper we study how international trade in goods and services interact at the firm level. Using a rich dataset on Belgian firms for the period 1995?2005, we show that: i) firms are much more likely to source servi...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

The threat of competition and public school performance: evidence from Poland

Theoretical literature on whether school competition raises public school productivity is ambiguous (e.g. MacLeod & Urquiola, 2015) and empirical evidence is mixed (e.g. Hsieh and Urquiola, 2006). Moreover, competition m...Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine:

Life satisfaction, QALYs, and the monetary value of health

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

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying wider economic impacts of agglomeration for transport appraisal: existing evidence and future directions

This paper is concerned with the Wider Economic Impacts (WEIs) of transport improvements that arise via scale economies of agglomeration. It reviews the background theory and empirical evidence on agglomeration, explains...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

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

CEP discussion paper

The interconnections between services and goods trade at the firm-level

In this paper we study how international trade in goods and services interact at the firm level. Using a rich dataset on Belgian firms during the period 1995-2005, we show that: i) firms are much more likely to source se...Read more...

Journal article

The World Bank Economic Review:

On minimizing the risk of bias in randomized controlled trials in economics

Estimation of empirical relationships is prone to bias. Economists have carefully studied sources of bias in structural and quasi-experimental approaches, but the randomized control trial (RCT) has only begun to receive ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Psychology:

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

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

Journal article

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...

CEP discussion paper

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average of adulthood. We her...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Compact City in Empirical Research: A Quantitative Literature Review

The `compact city? is one of the most prominent concepts to have emerged in the global urban policy debate, though it is difficult to ascertain to what extent its theorised positive outcomes can be substantiated by evide...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The key determinants of happiness and misery

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

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

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

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