Results

Blog

VoxEU:

Firms slice up global production to protect their knowhow

Imitation is a first-order concern for enterprises operating global production processes. Firms routinely source knowledge-intensive inputs from many countries, including those with weak intellectual property laws. This ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employer market power: models and methods

It is now widely recognized that employers hold some wage-setting power over workers, and several recent reviews cover the resulting surge of research on monopsony. We take a high-level view, introducing the idea of the ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Industrial Economics:

Asymmetric pass-through and competition

We study the retail price pass-through of four major tax changes in petroleum products using daily pricing data from gas stations on small Greek islands. We find that (i) the pass-through of the tax hikes is five times h...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

When trust in official statistics declines

Trust in official economic statistics has become an increasingly salient policy issue, including in the US where the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was dismissed in August 2025 amid allegations that agenc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The civil war reduced slave owners' economic power but increased their political influence

Did Southern elites? economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave owning and two Northern states (1850?1880), we docume...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

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

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

CEP discussion paper

What is the "right" geographic market definition?

This paper examines the "right" geographic definition of relevant markets by analyzing how excise tax pass-through varies with local competition in the retail gasoline market of a large metropolitan city. Using a natural...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Industrial Organization:

What is the "right" geographic market definition?

This paper examines the "right" geographic definition of relevant markets by analyzing how excise tax pass-through varies with local competition in the retail gasoline market of a large metropolitan city. Using a natural...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Confusopoly unveiled: How firms use complexity to raise prices

Can entire markets strategically confuse consumers to raise prices? This column tracks the prices of nearly all mobile phone tariffs and handsets in the UK from 2010 to 2012, and finds that quality-adjusted prices rise i...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Cultural exception?

Why book publishing contradicts conventional wisdom about competition....Read more...

Chapter

Fostering green and inclusive productivity growth

in The London Consensus

This chapter explains the main ideas underpinning the Schumpeterian growth paradigm and how it provides a new lens to look at the determinants and effects of the growth process. Schumpeter was pessimistic about the futur...Read more...

Journal article

International Economics:

Reassessing EU comparative advantage: the role of technology

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

Blog

LSE Europp:

Cultural exception? Why regulating the book market contradicts conventional wisdom about competition

Fixing retail book prices is a common policy in Europe, but how does preventing competition affect booksellers and buyers? Christos Genakos, Lorien Sabatino and Tommaso Valletti find that when the ability to offer custom...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Management and firm dynamism

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and improve the performan...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Lobbying for globalisation

Using detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we construct a unique dataset that allows us to identify which firms lobby on Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) negotiated by the Unite...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Labor unions and the electoral consequences of trade liberalization

We show that the Brazilian trade liberalization in the early 1990s led to a permanent relative decline in the vote share of left-wing presidential candidates in the regions more affected by the tariff cuts. This happened...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

New approaches to measure (increasing) concentration in Europe

Concentration (the share of a market's output produced by its largest firms) is a key proxy for measuring market competition. This column introduces a cross-country dataset to measure concentration at the industry level ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of International Economics:

Political competition and the strategic adoption of free trade agreements

I study how political competition affects the feasibility of free trade agreements (FTAs). I show that the possibility of political turnover creates strategic motivations for the formation of FTAs. Specifically, a govern...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industry concentration in Europe: trends and methodological insights

Concentration - the share of an industry's output accounted for by its largest firms and a frequently used proxy of competition - has increased in European countries. This paper provides evidence about this development b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

This paper studies how globalization influences intergenerational income mobility. We develop a dynamic economic geography model with overlapping generations, migration costs, and sectoral persistence. The model shows th...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Industrial Organization:

VAT pass-through and competition: evidence from the Greek islands

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we investigate how changes i...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Has work from home shifted the US electoral map?

Since 2020, the dramatic rise in remote work has coincided with increased geographic mobility in the United States. We examine the relationship between these trends and their effects on the electoral landscape. Using IRS...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Political competition and the strategic adoption of free trade agreements

I study how political competition affects the feasibility of free trade agreements (FTAs). I show that the possibility of political turnover creates strategic motivations for the formation of FTAs. Specifically, a govern...Read more...

Blog

Promarket:

Does Domestic Competition Help EU Firms Compete Abroad?

In a survey of nearly 400 European firms that export abroad, Elena Argentesi, Livia De Simone, Stephan Paetz, Vincenzo Scrutinio find that most firms believe that competition forces them to produce cheaper and higher qua...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Learning about women's competence: the dynamic response of political parties to gender quotas in South Korea

We study the dynamic responses of political parties to gender quotas in South Korean municipal councils, a setting with nearly zero women pre-quota. We exploit two unique institutional features: the quota intensity is di...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Asymmetric pass-through and competition

We study the retail price pass-through of four major tax changes in petroleum products using daily pricing data from gas stations on small Greek islands. We find that (i) the pass-through of the tax hikes is five times h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm heterogeneity and imperfect competition in global production networks

How do production networks and market structure interact to shape the effects of trade and competition policy? We develop a model with two-sided firm heterogeneity, matching frictions, and imperfect supplier competition....Read more...

Journal article

Critical Sociology:

A popular backlash against globalization?

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

Blog

Vox EU:

Mafias and Firms (Podcast)

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

CEP discussion paper

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

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

Journal article

American Economic Review:

When tariffs disrupt global supply chains

We study unanticipated tariffs in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms conduct costly searches and negotiate with potential suppliers that pass a reservation level of match productivity. Global supply ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association :

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

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

CEP discussion paper

Immigration and political realignment

This paper examines how immigration reshapes political landscapes, centring on the influx of immigrants from the EU's 2004 enlargement and its implications for the UK. I use a new variation in exposure to immigration bas...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

How polarised are citizens? Measuring ideology from the ground-up

We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Powers that be? Political alignment, government formation, and government stability

We study how partisan alignment across levels of government affects coalition formation and government stability using a regression discontinuity design and a large dataset of Spanish municipal elections. We document a p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labour market power: new evidence on Non-Compete Agreements and the effects of M&A in the UK

Monopsony power is an important feature of modern labour markets. We examine its impact on workers. We report the first representative survey of Non-Compete-Agreements (NCA) in the UK and find that about 26% of workers a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Political ideology and innovation

We study the role of political ideology for a critical group of economic agents: inventors. We document that, in "politically polarizing" fields, inventors patent innovations aligned with their political beliefs. We cons...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

Financing UK democracy: a stocktake of 20 years of political donations disclosure

Political donations in the UK have been subject to comprehensive disclosure since 2001. We study the data produced as part of this disclosure policy to evaluate the role of private and public political finance over time....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Business Studies:

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

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

Journal article

Journal of Comparative Economics:

Historical roots of political extremism: the effects of Nazi occupation of Italy

We study the impact of the Italian Civil War and Nazi occupation of Italy in 1943?45 on postwar political outcomes. The Communist Party, which was more active in the resistance movement, gained votes in areas where the N...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Management Studies:

Business groups and export performance: the role of coordination failures and institutional configurations

We explore the nature of business groups (BGs) and their affiliates in emerging markets through the lens of the coordination failures associated with economic development. We propose that BGs develop distinct economic an...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Economic insecurity and political preferences

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention, but there is no consensus as to its definition. We characterize a class of individual economic-insecurity measures based on the time profile of economic resources. We ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The long shadow of local decline: birthplace economic adversity and long-term individual outcomes in the UK

Does growing up in a high-economic adversity area matter for individual economic, cultural, and political views? Despite a significant focus upon the effect of birthplace on economic outcomes, there is less evidence on h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

VAT pass-through and competition: evidence from the Greek Islands

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we investigate how changes i...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Local concentration and structural transformation

The national market shares of the leading US firms in many industries have risen substantially over the last four decades - ie, these industries have become more concentrated. David Autor, Christina Patterson and John Va...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sanctions and misallocation. How sanctioned firms won and Russia lost

Using a unique natural experiment of staggered firm-level sanctions against Russia in 2014-2020 and the data on over 600,000 Russian firms, I estimate the effect of "smart" sanctions on targeted firms and on the aggregat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Patents that match your standards: firm-level evidence on competition and innovation

When a technology becomes the new standard, the firms that are leaders in producing this technology have a competitive advantage. Matching the semantic content of patents to standards and exploiting the exogenous timing ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics :

Competition and pass-through: evidence from isolated markets

We measure how pass-through varies with competition in isolated oligopolistic markets with captive consumers. Using daily pricing data from gas stations on small Greek islands, we study how unanticipated and exogenous ch...Read more...

Chapter

Industrial policy and competition

in Globalization, Firms, and Workers

Using a comprehensive dataset of all medium and large enterprises in China between 1998 and 2007, we show that industrial policies allocated to competitive sectors or that foster competition in a sector increase producti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm-level technological change and skill demand

We quantify the contribution of firm-level technological change to skill demand and aggregate inequality in the presence of imperfect competition in the labor market. We show that skill-biased technological change increa...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Young people's university plans: evidence from German reunification

Around a decade after Germany's reunification, a long-standing educational gap between the east and west of the country - completion of the certificate needed to enter university - had closed. Ghazala Azmat and Katja Kau...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Five ways for leaders to work faster, better, and more inclusively

As the world of work changes, so should leadership. Grace Lordan describes five ways for leaders to become more effective....Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Trade with nominal rigidities: understanding the unemployment and welfare effects of the China shock

Researchers examine how increased competition from China impacts the welfare of the US labour market....Read more...

Chapter

The backlash of globalization

in Handbook of International Economics

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...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Marshall lecture 2020 the measure of monopsony

There has been increasing interest in recent years in monopsony in the labour market. This paper discusses how we can measure monopsony power by combining insights from models based on both frictions and idiosyncrasies. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Product market competition, creative destruction and innovation

We examine the economic analysis of the relationship between innovation and product market competition. First, we give a brief tour of the intellectual history of the area. Second, we examine how the Aghion-Howitt framew...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

AI-tocracy

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Import competition, heterogeneous preferences of managers, and productivity

When managers have objectives beyond maximizing monetary profits, inefficiencies may arise. An increase in competition may then force managers to improve the productivity of the firm in order to ensure survival. While th...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 discussion paper

Pandemic shock and economic divergence: political economy before and after the black death

We document how the Black Death activated politics and led to economic divergence within Europe. Before the pandemic, economic development was similar in Eastern and Western German cities despite greater political fragme...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Populism and civil society

Since Tocqueville (1835), civil society has been recognized as a cornerstone of liberal democracy. But populists claim to be the only legitimate representatives of the people, leaving no space for civil society. Are popu...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...

Government consultation

A response to the consultation document: 'A new pro-competition regime for digital markets'

Professor John Van Reenen writing to submit his views on the government's consultation document 'A new pro-competition regime for digital markets'....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Opposing firm-level responses to the China shock: horizontal competition versus vertical relationships

We decompose the "China shock" into two components that induce different adjustments for firms exposed to Chinese exports: a horizontal shock affecting firms selling goods that compete with similar imported Chinese goods...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The measure of monopsony

There has been increasing interest in recent years in monopsony in labour market. This paper discusses how we can measure monopsony power combining insights from models based on both frictions and idiosyncrasies. It pres...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Competition and pass-through on the Greek islands

A fundamental issue in economics is how firms deal with unexpected cost increases, perhaps arising from taxes, exchange rate fluctuations or rising input prices: what drives the extent to which they pass the costs throug...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...

CEP discussion paper

Innovation and human capital policy

If innovation is to be subsidized, a natural place to start is to increase the quantity and quality of human capital. Innovation, after all, begins with people. Simply stimulating the ?demand side? through R&D subsidies ...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Global banking: endogenous competition and risk taking

When banks expand abroad, their riskiness decreases if foreign expansion happens in destination countries that are more competitive than their origin countries. We reach this conclusion in three steps. First, we develop ...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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Productivity growth in one country affects the relative income and welfare of its trade partners

One of the most dramatic changes in the world economy over the past half century has been the emergence of China as a major force in world trade. A central question in international economics is the implications of such ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Industrial Organization:

Critically important: the heterogeneous effect of diplomatic tensions on trade

With global value chains interlocking todaya??s economies, what is the impact of diplomatic tensions on international trade? We exploit variation in monthly data on imports, a measure of imported input use in the domesti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Generalized linear competition: from pass-through to policy

Economic policy and shifts in input market prices often have significant effects on the marginal costs of firms and can prompt strategic responses that make their impact hard to predict. We introduce "generalized linear ...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 discussion paper

Environmental preferences and technological choices: is market competition clean or dirty?

We investigate the effects of consumers' environmental concerns and market competition on firms' decisions to innovate in 'clean' technologies. Agents care about their consumption and environmental footprint; firms pursu...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Public goods institutions, human capital, and growth: evidence from German history

What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study public goods provision established through new laws in German cities during the 1500s. Cities that adopted the laws subsequently ...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...

CEP discussion paper

Import competition, heterogeneous preferences of managers and productivity

When managers have objectives beyond maximizing monetary profits, inefficiencies may arise. An increase in competition may then force managers to improve the productivity of the firm in order to ensure survival. While th...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

European Economic Review:

Strategic inattention, delegation and endogenous market structure

We model an industry in which a discrete number of firms choose the output of their differentiated products, deciding whether or not to consider the impact of their decisions on aggregate output. The firm's choice of ign...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Economic insecurity breeds support for the right

Economic insecurity breeds support for the right Economic insecurity is attracting growing attention in social, academic, and policy circles. It has arguably risen for a number of reasons in recent years: the Great Rece...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic insecurity and the rise of the right

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention in social, academic and policy circles. However, there is no consensus as to its precise definition. Intuitively, economic insecurity is multi-faceted, making any compr...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

Journal of International Economics:

Geography, competition, and optimal multilateral trade policy

How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Competition and pass-through: evidence from isolated markets

We measure how pass-through varies with competition in isolated oligopolistic markets with captive consumers. Using daily pricing data from gas stations on small Greek islands, we study how unanticipated and exogenous ch...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A toolkit of policies to promote innovation

Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to under-provide innovation due to the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the US and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summari...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Foreign expansion, competition and bank risk

Using a novel dataset on the 15 European banks classified as G-SIBs from 2005 to 2014, we find that the impact of foreign expansion on risk is always negative and significant for most individual and systemic risk metrics...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

What drives differences in management practices?

Partnering with the US Census Bureau, we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in two waves of 35,000 manufacturing plants in 2010 and 2015. We fnd an enormous dispersion of management practices acr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Geography, competition and optimal multilateral trade policy

How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a mo...Read more...

Journal article

Scandinavian Journal of Economics:

Gender and promotions: evidence from academic economists in France

Differences in promotion across genders are still prevalent in many occupations. Recent work based on experimental evidence indicates that women participate less in or exert lower effort during contests. We exploit the u...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Industrial Organization:

Flex cars and competition in fuel retail markets

We study how the diffusion of flex (bi-fuel) cars affected competition on ethanol and gasoline retail markets. We propose a model of price competition in which the two fuels become closer substitutes as flex cars penetra...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...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The price ain't right? hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured

We use insurance claims data covering 28% of individuals with employersponsored health insurance in the United States to study the variation in health spending on the privately insured, examine the structure of insurer-h...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

Monetary policy, product market competition and growth

In this paper we argue that monetary easing fosters growth more in more credit-constrained environments, and the more so the higher the degree of product market competition. Indeed when competition is low, large rents al...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...