Results

CEP discussion paper

Minimum wages and low wage workers: compliance as non-employment margin

This paper examines the impact of a substantial minimum wage increase in Uruguay - a middle-income developing economy - on wages and employment. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences approach, we anal...Read more...

Journal article

Climate Policy:

Policing carbon markets

Carbon markets have emerged in recent decades as one of the most important tools for curbing industrial greenhouse gas emissions, but they present a number of novel enforcement challenges as compared to more conventional...Read more...

External report

A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era

We present for the first time a model of children's evolving socio-emotional and cognitive skills to assess how the educational and lifetime prospects of children of different ages, genders and socio-economic backgrounds...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... How citizens help expose environmental wrongdoing

Does enabling citizens to complain about public services provide an effective way of improving government services, or should we be concerned about the accuracy and reliability of such reports? Jonathan Colmer, Mary Evan...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...

CEP discussion paper

Environmental citizen complaints

Citizen complaints feature prominently in public oversight contexts. The nature and effects of complaints, however, are controversial and poorly understood. Here, we exploit novel administrative data on over 130,000 envi...Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine:

The impact of Covid-19 lockdown stringency on loneliness in five European countries

The coronavirus pandemic has forced governments to implement a variety of different dynamic lockdown-stringency strategies in the last two years. Extensive lockdown periods could have potential unin- tended consequences ...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...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Lockdown, essential sectors, and Covid-19: lessons from Italy

This paper investigates how economic activity impacted Covid-19 infections and all-cause mortality. To this purpose, we exploit the distribution of essential sectors, which were exempted from a national lockdown enacted ...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Covid-19 compliance behavior of older people: the role of cognitive and non-cognitive skills

This paper examines the empirical relationship between individuals? cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and COVID-19 compliance behaviors using cross-country data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Eur...Read more...

Journal article

Environmental Research Letters:

Saving the world from your couch: the heterogeneous medium-run benefits of Covid-19 lockdowns on air pollution

In Spring 2020, COVID-19 led to an unprecedented halt in public and economic life across the globe. In an otherwise tragic time, this provides a unique natural experiment to investigate the environmental impact of such a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The trade impact of the Covid-19 pandemic

Using a gravity-like approach, we study how Covid-19 deaths and lockdown policies affected countries' imports from China during 2020. We find that a country's own Covid-19 deaths and lockdowns significantly reduced its i...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

How to improve tax compliance: Evidence from population-wide experiments in Belgium

Tax compliance lies at the heart of well-functioning societies, but the US and Europe spend vast sums annually to enforce it. This column discusses the results of population-wide experiments run in collaboration with the...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

How to improve tax compliance? Evidence from population-wide experiments in Belgium

We study the impact of simplification, deterrence, and tax morale on tax compliance. We ran four natural field experiments varying the communication of the tax administration with the universe of income taxpayers in Belg...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Covid-19, lockdowns and well-being: evidence from Google Trends

The COVID-19 pandemic and government intervention such as lockdowns may severely affect people's mental health. While lockdowns can help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to popula...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changing patterns of domestic abuse during Covid-19 lockdown

The effects of preventing a COVID-19 health crisis have had unintended consequences on domestic abuse (DA) victimization. We contribute to the literature on domestic abuse in lockdown by providing insight on how changing...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Partial lockdown and the spread of Covid-19: lessons from the Italian case

This paper investigates the effect of exemption of essential sectors from the lockdown enacted in Italy in Spring 2020 on COVID-19 infections and mortality. We exploit the distribution of the density of essential workers...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Are happier people more compliant? Global evidence from three large-scale surveys during Covid-19 lockdowns

Around the world, governments have been asking their citizens to practice physical distancing and stay at home to contain the spread of Covid-19. Are happier people more willing to comply with these measures? Using three...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How to improve tax compliance? Evidence from population-wide experiments in Belgium

We study the impact of deterrence, tax morale, and simplifying information on tax compliance. We ran _ve experiments spanning the tax process which varied the communication of the tax administration with all income taxpa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Eliciting taxpayer preferences increases tax compliance

Two experiments show that eliciting taxpayer preferences on government spending?providing taxpayer agency--increases tax compliance. We first create an income and taxation environment in a laboratory setting to test for ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Has the British National Minimum Wage Had Little or No Impact on Employment?

A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW). That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony, international labour standards, inspection and compliance and...Read more...