Results

CEP discussion paper

Universities, new tasks, and the rise of services

Structural transformation from manufacturing to services varies sharply across US regions. We document that regions with universities, especially highly ranked research institutions, experience faster growth in high-skil...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...

Blog

What works centre for local economic growth:

Do cities and regions gain from public sector relocation?

In this guest blog, Dr. Max Nathan, Henry Overman, Capucine Riom, and Maria Sanchez-Vidal set out evidence on the impact of BBC (partial) relocation to Salford on wider employment in the area. This blog was originally pu...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...

Blog

The Conversation:

Why building new towns isn't the answer to the UK's housing crisis

The UK's new government is intent on building 1.5 million homes over the next five years. It's all part of the plan to address the housing supply and affordability crisis. Many of these homes are to be built in the form...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Identifying agglomeration shadows: long-run evidence from ancient ports

We examine "agglomeration shadows" that emerge around large cities, which discourage some economic activities in nearby areas. Identifying agglomeration shadows is complicated, however, by endogenous city formation and "...Read more...

Journal article

Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing:

Can social media reach isolated domestic abuse victims? Evidence from a randomized control trial during the Covid-19 lockdown

Research Questions Can social media reach isolated domestic abuse victims? Secondly, does providing victims with more information and a safer means of contacting police change their likelihood of domestic abuse reporting...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Industry Competition and Trade:

A new approach for better industrial strategies

Industrial policy is back. After having been considered a taboo since the 1970s, ?new industrial policies? are at the core of governments? strategies to support countries during crises and enable the green and digital tr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Politics :

Wait and see? Public opinion dynamics after terrorist attacks

We use the occurrence of the London bombings in July 7 2005 during the fieldwork period of the British Social Attitudes Survey to analyse the dynamics of public support for measures curbing core freedoms. We observe no c...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

There's a view out there - call it the "superhero" theory of leadership - in which the individual vision, charisma, and brilliance of a CEO makes or breaks a company. That view is dangerous - not so much because CEOs don...Read more...

Journal article

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications:

The impact of Covid-19 on digital communication patterns

We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees' digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggreg...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Market tremors: Shale gas exploration, earthquakes, and their impact on house prices

Shale gas has grown to become a major new source of energy in countries around the globe. While its importance for energy supply is well recognized, there has also been public concern over potential risks from hydraulic ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

Why unions survive: understanding how unions overcome the free-rider problem

This paper provides evidence for why individuals join unions instead of free riding. I model membership as legal insurance. To test the model, I use the incidence of news stories concerning allegations against teachers i...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...

CentrePiece article

Jihadi attacks, the media and anti-Muslim hate crime

Do international jihadi terror attacks lead to an increase in local anti-Muslim hate crimes? Analysing data from the Greater Manchester Police, Ria Ivandic, Tom Kirchmaier and Stephen Machin find that the Muslim populati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why unions: understanding how unions overcome the free-rider problem

This paper provides evidence for why individuals join unions instead of free-riding. I model membership as legal insurance. To test the model, I use the incidence of news stories concerning allegations against teachers i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Jihadi attacks, media and local hate crime

Empirical connections between local anti-Muslim hate crimes and international jihadi terror attacks are studied. Based upon rich administrative data from Greater Manchester Police, event studies of ten terror attacks rev...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

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

A unified approach to estimating demand and welfare

The measurement of price changes, economic welfare, and demand parameters is currently based on three disjoint approaches: macroeconomic models derived from time-invariant utility functions, microeconomic estimation base...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...

CEP discussion paper

Foreign direct investment and domestic entrepreneurship: blessing or curse?

This paper explores the effects of foreign direct investment, measured by mergers and acquisitions, on domestic entrepreneurial entry. We use a micro-panel of more than two thousand individuals disaggregated by industry ...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Welfare to Work: The Evidence on Labour?s New Deal Policies

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CEP discussion paper

Policy Design in a Model with Swings in Risk Appetite

This paper studies the policy implications of habits and cyclical changes in agents' appetite for risk-taking. To do so, it analyses the non-linear solution of a New Keynesian (NK) model, in which slow-moving habits help...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incentives for Quality over Time - The Case of Facebook Applications

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engag...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Cotton and cars: the huge gains from process innovation

New inventions are good for economic growth, but equally important are improvements in the way we make things - what's known as process innovation. Tim Leunig and Joachim Voth measure the impact of two such innovations -...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Effects of Agglomeration on Wages: Evidence from the Micro-Level

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spinning Welfare: the Gains from Process Innovation in Cotton and Car Production

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently econo...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Predicting the Geography of House Prices

Prediction is difficult. In this paper we use panel data methods to make reasonably accurate shortterm ex-post predictions of house prices across 353 local authority areas in England. The issue of prediction over the lon...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Simulating Wages and House Prices Using the NEG

The paper incorporates house prices within an NEG framework leading to the spatial distributions of wages, prices and income. The model assumes that all expenditure goes to firms under a monopolistic competition market s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Empirics of New Economic Geography

Although a rich and extensive body of theoretical research on new economic geography has emerged, empirical research remains comparatively less well developed. This paper reviews the existing empirical literature on the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic Geography: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature

This paper reviews the new economic geography literature, which accounts for the uneven distribution of economic activity across space in terms of a combination of love of variety preferences, increasing returns to scale...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A 'New Trade' Theory of GATT/WTO Negotiations

I develop a novel theory of GATT/WTO negotiations. This theory provides new answers to two prominent questions in the trade policy literature: first, what is the purpose of trade negotiations? And second, what is the rol...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

Inflation Persistence When Price Stickiness Differs Between Industries

There is much evidence that price-adjustment frequencies vary widely across industries. This paper shows that inflation persistence is lower with heterogeneity in price stickiness than without it, taking as given the deg...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intrinsic Inflation Persistence

It is often argued that the New Keynesian Phillips curve is at odds with the data because it cannot explain inflation persistence ? the difficulty of returning inflation immediately to target after a shock without any lo...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

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

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...

CEP discussion paper

Monetary Policy Committees and Interest Rate Smoothing

We extend the New Keynesian Monetary Policy literature relaxing the assumption that the decisions are taken by a single policymaker, considering instead that monetary policy decisions are taken collectively in a committe...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...

CEP discussion paper

Union Free-Riding in Britain and New Zealand

The percentage of workers who choose not to join the union available to them at their workplace has been rising in Britain and New Zealand. Social custom, union instrumentality, the fixed costs of joining, employee perce...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...

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

Monetary Misconceptions

The paper identifies a number of misconceptions about the monetary policy process and the monetary transmission mechanism in the UK. Among the misconceptions about the process are the alleged lack of regional and sectora...Read more...