Results

CEP occasional paper

UK national productivity trends: getting the data right

We compare standard productivity estimates of UK output per worker derived from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) with newly released estimates based on more reliable "Real Time Information" (RTI) administrative data. LFS-ba...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...

Journal article

Journal of Property Investment and Finance:

Real estate insights: sweetening the dog's breakfast that is British property taxes

Purpose - This study aims to stimulate debate on the long overdue strategic reform of property taxes. Design/methodology/approach - This study adopts an approach combining a systematic literature review with economic ana...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Council tax is an unfair mess - here's a system that could work better

The consensus says that it's a bad tax, yet politicians have been shying away from reforming council tax for decades. Paul Cheshire offers an alternative that could be fairer and act as the wealth tax that many are calli...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mobile internet connectivity and household wealth in the Philippines

Mobile internet has become a fundamental component of modern infrastructure. In this paper, we consider the impact of mobile internet connectivity on household wealth in the Philippines. We construct a granular measure o...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The price of power: why rising markups hurt innovation and widen inequality

Over the past four decades, the United States has seen rising market power, slowing productivity growth and deepening wealth inequality. Giammario Impullitti and Pontus Rendahl explore how declining competition may be th...Read more...

Government consultation

Treasury Committee: National Wealth Fund

Professor Neil Lee gives evidence to the Commons Treasury Committee. The committee is asking whether the National Wealth Fund has the right tools and backing to drive meaningful economic growth...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

How to make Labour's National Wealth Fund work

Labour's plans for growth include the creation of a National Wealth Fund. A closer look at the proposals reveals that this is not like other Sovereign Wealth Funds, but is in fact more like a Green Investment Bank, meant...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market power, growth and wealth inequality

In recent decades, the United States has experienced a notable rise in markups, a slowdown in productivity growth, and an increase in wealth inequality. We present a framework that unifies these trends into a common driv...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

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 using variation in the likelihood that houses are repossessed coming from heterogeneity in preferences of local judges. We develop a framework tha...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...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What share of the economic pie goes to workers?

Over the last two decades, the proportion of national income going to employees and the self-employed - the labour share - has declined in many advanced economies. This has not happened in the UK, which might seem like g...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Land use regulation, homeownership and wealth inequality

We examine the role that housing market regulatory restrictiveness plays in differentially affecting the net wealth of owners and renters over time, and its contribution to wealth inequality. In tightly regulated desirab...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

How the national living wage helps the UK's poorest households: new research

The UK's national living wage has just been raised by 10% to #11.44 per hour. It is now payable for all workers aged 21 and over, where previously it was for those aged 23 and over. Introduced in 2016 as the flagship pol...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Measuring absolute income mobility: lessons from North America and Europe

We use linked parent-child administrative data for five countries in North America and Europe, as well as detailed survey data for two more, to investigate methodological challenges in the estimation of absolute income m...Read more...

Journal article

PLoS ONE :

Access to digital finance: Equity crowdfunding across countries and platforms

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The erosion of homeownership and minority wealth

Since the Great Recession, the traditional path to wealth creation through home ownership has stalled and worsened for many minority households. One potential and largely unexplored driver of this trend is the growing pr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Local and national concentration trends in jobs and sales: the role of structural transformation

National U.S. industrial concentration rose between 1992-2017. Simultaneously, the Herfindhahl Index of local (six-digit-NAICS by county) employment concentration fell. This divergence between national and local employme...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Economic Inequality:

Intergenerational home ownership

This paper studies intergenerational links in home ownership, an increasingly important wealth marker and a measure of economic status in itself. Repeated cross sectional UK data show that home ownership rates have falle...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution

Did overseas slave-holding by Britons accelerate the Industrial Revolution? We provide theory and evidence on the contribution of slave wealth to Britain's growth prior to 1835. We compare areas of Britain with high and ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal :

On Target? Sanctions and the interests of elite policy makers in Iran

How successful are sanctions at targeting the economic interests of political elites in affected countries? We study the case of Iran, using information on the stock exchange-listed assets of two specific political entit...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Household inequality and remittances in rural Thailand: a life-cycle perspective

This article studies the dynamics of income inequality among a panel of rural households in Thailand. In contrast to the many cross-section studies of income inequality, the article exploits a long panel data set to exam...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 Economic History:

The long shadow of slavery: the persistence of slave owners in southern lawmaking

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trends in intergenerational home ownership and wealth transmission

Prior research on trends in intergenerational mobility in economic status has focused chiefly on income and earnings. There is hardly any research on trends in intergenerational wealth transmission, at least in part beca...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...

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...

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

World Trade Review:

Reopening Pandora's box in search of a WTO-compatible industrial policy? The Brazil-taxation dispute

We critically assess the Appellate Body (AB) report on the Brazil-Taxation dispute, taken to the World Trade Organisation by the European Union and Japan, and encompassing seven different Brazilian industrial programmes ...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

Reopening Pandora's box in search of a WTO-compatible industrial policy? The Brazil-taxation dispute

The Brazil-Taxation dispute concerns the complaints taken to the World Trade Organisation by the European Union and Japan against seven different Brazilian industrial subsidy programmes. One concerned the automotive sect...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic impacts of constraining home investments

We investigate how political backlash against wealthy investors in high-amenity places affects local residents. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment: the `Swiss Second Home Initiative?, which banned the construction of ...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...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Weekend opening of GP practices

Can increased access to GPs reduce overcrowding in hospitals' Accidents & Emergency departments? Research by Peter Dolton and Vikram Pathania assesses whether weekend GP opening hours introduced in 2013 in four surgeries...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Housing Market Impacts of Constraining Second Home Investments

We investigate how political backlash against wealthy second home investors in high-amenity places ? tourist areas or superstar cities ? affects local residents. We develop a general equilibrium model and exploit a quasi...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Inequality: Are we really 'all in this together'?

The UK's top 1% have between 12.5% and 15.5% of all income. This is mid-way between the United States (20%) and Continental Europe (8%). This share has been rising steadily since the late 1970s, mainly due to labour inco...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wealth shocks and health outcomes: evidence from stock market fluctuations

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I sho...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Minimum wages: the economics and the politics

The UK?s national minimum wage has tackled extreme low pay ? but the wider problem of low pay remains as serious as ever. That is one of the conclusions of Professor Alan Manning in a discussion of the growing popularity...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Life Opportunities: The Evidence on the UK?s Declining Social Mobility

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CEP occasional paper

Has the growth of real GDP in the UK been overstated because of mis-measurement of banking output?

If official figures overstated the growth of banking output in the UK in the recent boom, does this mean that GDP growth was overstated too? The answer is no. It is truer to say that if banking output was overstated then...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills special paper

CEE Special Report: The Children's Workforce: A Data Scoping Study. A Report for the Department of Children, School and Family (DCSF)

There has been much policy interest on the theme of children's services in recent years. For example, the 1998 National Child Strategy explicitly aims to ensure good quality, affordable childcare for children aged 0 to 1...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

Efficiency Wages and the Economic Effects of the Minimum Wage: Evidence from a Low-Wage Labour Market

We exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1990 introduction of the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) to investigate the relationship between wages and monitoring and to test for Efficiency Wages considerations in a lo...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...

CEP discussion paper

A Statistical Framework for the Analysis of Productivity and Sustainable Development

To analyse the consequences of the changing economic structure of the UK, we need a set of statistics broken down by industry that are consistent with the whole economy measures available from the national accounts. The ...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...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

The effects of minimum wages on employment: theory and evidence from Britain

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by empirical work in some labor markets. We presen...Read more...