Results

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The economic dynamics of city structure: evidence from Hiroshima's recovery

We provide new theory and evidence on the resilience of the internal city structure after a large shock by analyzing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Exploiting newly digitized data, we document that the city structure r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Household taxation, nonlinear occupations, and gender gaps

An enduring source of gender inequality is that some high-paying ("nonlinear") occupations penalize balancing work and household time commitments, as emphasized by Goldin (2014). We ask how household taxation interacts w...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...

CentrePiece article

Hiroshima: urban resilience after the atomic bomb

Why the city centre re-emerged from destruction....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating labour market power: the long and short of it

This paper combines two empirical traditions in the study of employer monopsony power. One tradition estimates static firm labour supply elasticities, while the other focuses on labour market flows, estimating separation...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm dynamics and growth with soft budget constraints

We develop a model of endogenous growth and firm dynamics with soft budget constraints, where firms differ in their innovation speed and slower firms need additional financing in order to eventually innovate. As creditor...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Service offshoring and export experience

Service inputs significantly influence export costs and firm internationalisation. A new dataset on French firms? participation in global value chains reveals that experienced exporters are more likely to source services...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Empirical welfare analysis with hedonic budget constraints

We analyze demand settings where heterogeneous consumers maximize utility for product attributes subject to a nonlinear budget constraint. We develop nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of interventions that chang...Read more...

Journal article

Demography:

Population growth, immigration, and labor market dynamics

This article provides a first synthesis of population flows and labor market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations. We devise a novel dynamic accounting methodology that integrates population flows from t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why delay? Understanding the construction lag, aka the build out rate

We explore the determinants of the speed of residential development after dwelling construction starts. Using a sample of over 140,000 residential developments in England from 1996 to 2015 and employing an instrumental v...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic dynamics of city structure: evidence from Hiroshima's recovery

We provide new theory and evidence on the resilience of the internal city structure after a large shock by analyzing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Exploiting newly digitized data, we document that the city structure r...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Sequentially exporting products across countries

Exploiting disaggregated data on French exporters, we show that firms expand their product scope and geographical presence sequentially. This process of internationalization is uneven over time, exhibiting more volatilit...Read more...

Journal article

Econometrica:

Dynamic spatial general equilibrium

We incorporate forward-looking capital accumulation into a dynamic discrete choice model of migration. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium; generalize existing dynamic exact-hat algebra techniques to incorporate...Read more...

Journal article

Industrial and Corporate Change :

Industry concentration in Europe and North America

This paper presents new evidence on industry concentration at both the country and the world-region levels. It calculates country-level industry concentration measures from the novel data representative of the entire fir...Read more...

Journal article

Quantitative Economics:

Income dynamics in the United Kingdom and the impact of the Covid-19 recession

In this paper, we use an employer-based survey of earnings and hours to set out the key patterns in UK earnings dynamics from 1975 to 2020, with a particular focus on the most recent recession. We demonstrate that (log) ...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics :

The slope of the Phillips Curve: evidence from US States

We estimate the slope of the Phillips curve in the cross section of U.S. states using newly constructed state-level price indices for nontradeable goods back to 1978. Our estimates indicate that the slope of the Phillips...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Population growth, immigration and labour market dynamics

This paper examines the role of population flows on labour market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations in the United Kingdom. Population flows are large, and cyclical, driven first by the maturation of b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic spatial general equilibrium

We develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model with forward-looking investment and migration decisions. We characterize analytically the transition path of the spatial distribution of economic activity in respons...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Service offshoring and export experience

Service inputs are a key component of the costs of exporting, and contribute to explain the process of internationalization of firms. A new dataset on the participation of French firms in global value chains reveals that...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sequential exporting across countries and products

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why have house prices risen so much more than rents in superstar cities?

In most countries ? particularly in supply constrained superstar cities ? house prices have risen much more strongly than rents over the last two decades. We provide an explanation that does not rely on falling interest ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industry concentration in Europe and North America

This report presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and bus...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The best versus the rest: divergence across firms during the global productivity slowdown

We document that labor productivity of the globally most productive firms ? the ?frontier? ? has diverged from all other firms ? the ?rest? ? throughout the 2000s. This divergence remains after controlling for capital in...Read more...

Journal article

IZA Journal of Labor Economics:

Reallocation and the role of firm composition effects on aggregate wage dynamics

Aggregate wages display little cyclicality compared to what a standard model would predict. Wage rigidities are an obvious candidate, but the existing literature has emphasized the need to take into account the growing i...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

The time value of housing: historical evidence on discount rates

Most London housing transactions involve trading long leases of varying lengths. We exploit this to estimate the time value of housing ? the relationship between the price of a property and the term of ownership ? over a...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Learning about the prospects for mobility: economic and political dynamics following fundamental policy reform

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. This paper generalizes the forw...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Smart and illicit: who becomes an entrepreneur and do they earn more?

We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between "entrepreneurs" and other business owners. We show that the incorporated self-employed and their businesses engage in activiti...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Take what you can: property rights, contestability and conflict

Weak property rights are strongly associated with underdevelopment, low state capacity and civil conflict. In economic models of conflict, outbreaks of violence require a prize that is both valuable and contestable. This...Read more...

Journal article

IZA Journal of Labor & Development:

Pathways from school to work in the developing world

This paper uses novel micro data from the ILO-STWT surveys to provide evidence on the duration, endpoint, and determinants of the transition from school to work in a sample of 23 low- and middle-income countries around t...Read more...

Journal article

IZA Journal of Labor Policy:

Wage rigidities and business cycle fluctuations: a linked employer-employee analysis

This paper analyses wage dynamics in Italy in the last 25 years with a special focus on the recent recession. Despite the rather rigid Italian institutional setting, using linked employer-employee data we find that wage ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Aggregate recruiting intensity

We develop a model of firm dynamics with random search in the labor market where hiring firms exert recruiting effort by spending resources to fill vacancies faster. Consistent with micro evidence, in the model fast-grow...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Institutions and export dynamics

We study how contract enforcement and export experience shape firm export dynamics in an environment with incomplete information. We show that exporters start with higher volumes and sell for longer periods in countries ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Dynemp: a StataA? routine for distributed micro-data analysis of business dynamics

This paper introduces a new Stata? command, dynemp, which implements a distributed micro-data analysis of business and employment dynamics and firm demographics. The data source it requires are business registers or comp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The dynamics of employment growth: new evidence from 18 countries

Motivated by the on-going interest of policy makers in the sources of job creation, this paper presents results from a new OECD project on the dynamics of employment (DynEmp) based on an innovative methodology using firm...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Institutions and Export Dynamics

We study the role of contract enforcement in shaping the dynamics of international trade at the firm level. We develop a theoretical model to describe how agents build reputations to overcome the problems created by weak...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Left, Right, Left: Income and Political Dynamics in Transition Economies

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upwar...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

From Russia with Love: The Impact of Relocated Firms on Incumbent Survival

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied z...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sequential Exporting

Firms need to incur substantial sunk costs to break in foreign markets, yet many give up exporting shortly after their first experience, which typically involves very small sales. Conversely, other new exporters shoot up...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Recovering the Sunk Costs of R&D: the Moulds Industry Case

Sunk costs for R&D are an important determinant of the level of innovation in the economy. In this paper I recover them using a Markov equilibrium framework. The contribution is twofold. First, a model of industry dynami...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Ins and Outs of European Unemployment

In this paper we study the contribution of inflows and outflows to the dynamics of unemployment in three European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. We compare performance in these three countries making us...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

U.S. Labor Market Dynamics Revisited

The picture of U.S. labor market dynamics is opaque. Empirical studies have yielded contradictory findings and debates have emerged regarding their implications. This paper aims at clarifying the picture, which is import...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trust-Based Trade

Weak enforcement of international contracts can substantially reduce international trade. We develop a model where agents build reputations to overcome the difficulties that this institutional failure causes in a context...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gross Worker Flows in the Presence of Informal Labor Markets. The Mexican Experience 1987-2002

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representative developing country with a large unregulated of ?informal? sector, Mexico. It finds, first, that the formal salaried sector show...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity Growth and Employment: Theory and Panel Estimates

Theoretical predictions of the effect of TFP growth on employment are ambiguous, and depend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We estimate a model for employment, wages and investment with an ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

One Third of the World's Growth and Inequality

This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India u two economies that account for a third of the world's population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Agglomeration Dynamics

This paper develops a model of economic growth and activity locating endogenously on a 3-dimensional featureless global geography. The same economic forces influence simulataneously growth, convergence, and spatial agglo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment Dynamics, Duration and Equilibrium: Evidence from Britain

This paper challenges the consensus on the nature of unemployment dynamics in Britain. We show that the argument that changes in unemployment arise mostly from changes in the duration of unemployment (rather than in the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cross Country Growth Comparison: Theory to Empirics

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth u both empiric...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Internet Cluster Emergence

Internet development holds the promise of transmitting economic value across physical space at zero marginal cost. In such a 'weightless economy', what factors matter for the location of economic activity and thus for ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Dynamics of International Specialisation

The theoretical literature on trade and growth suggests that comparative advantage is endogenous and evolves over time. However, most empirical analysis of international trade flows is essentially static in nature. This ...Read more...