Results

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China?s world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...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...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China's world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...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

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

Sweeping up gangs: the effects of tough-on-crime policies from a network approach

Globally, gang proliferation is fought primarily through sweeps. This paper uses a difference-in-differences strategy to examine their causal impact on crime for arrested individuals and their peers. Analysis focuses on ...Read more...

Journal article

SERIEs:

Paternity leave in Spain

Between 2017 and 2021, Spain progressively extended paternity leave from 2 to 16 weeks, equalizing it with maternity leave and introducing mandatory weeks. A 2018 reform also allowed fathers to split their leave. Using a...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Non-compete agreements, wages and efficiency: theory and evidence from Brazilian football

The Pele Act banned non-compete agreements in Brazilian football in 1998. We explore this policy change to study how non-competes affect the labour market. The Act changed the wage profile heterogeneously, reducing young...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Do larger firms exert more market power? Markups and markdowns along the size distribution

Combining financial statements with firm-level product prices, we find that larger firms exhibit lower markups, although they are overcompensated by substantially higher wage markdowns. We explain our divergence from pri...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...

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...

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...

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...

Chapter

New technologies and evolving market structures

in Handbook on Labour Markets in Transition

This Chapter investigates the relationship between technological changes, labour market frictions, and firms' labour market power. We provide guidance through the main trends that characterised labour markets during the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global robots

The diffusion of automation technology raises questions about the future of work, leading to calls for policy interventions. The ongoing debate centers on the decisions made by technology adopters. In this paper, I study...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Literature:

Temporary employment in markets with frictions

Temporary employment has spiked in OECD countries over the last 40 years and is now a common feature of their labor market landscape. A large body of empirical literature examines the spread of temporary employment, but ...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Economics:

Are friends electric? Valuing the social costs of power lines using house prices

Overhead electrical power lines and pylons have long raised concerns regarding the effects of electromagnetic fields on health, noise pollution and the visual impact on rural landscapes. These issues are once again salie...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mark-ups in the digital era

Relying on a novel dataset which combines balance sheet data on firms, patents, and industry-level proxies of technology for 25 countries in the period 2001-2014, we document an increase in mark-ups over time, mainly dri...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...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Commuting for crime

People care about crime, with the spatial distribution of both actual and perceived crime affecting the amenities from living in different areas and residential decisions. The literature finds that crime tends to happen ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review :

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do larger firms exert more market power? Markups and markdowns along the size distribution

Several models posit a positive cross-sectional correlation between markups and firm size, which characterizes misallocation, factor shares, and gains from trade. Accounting for labor market power in markup estimation, w...Read more...

Journal article

Comparative Economic Studies:

Political connections, business groups and innovation in Asia

It is acknowledged that Asia?s remarkable economic achievements of the past 50 years build on institutional arrangements very different from the West, including the central role of business groups (BGs) as an organisatio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are friends electric? Valuing the social costs of power lines using house prices

Overhead electrical power lines and pylons have long raised concerns regarding the effects of electromagnetic fields on health, noise pollution and the visual impact on rural landscapes. These issues are once again salie...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The measure of monopsony: the labour supply elasticity to the firm and its constituents

The estimation of labour supply elasticities is central to the measurement of monopsony power in the labor market. In this paper I provide new, firm-level estimates of the labour supply elasticity that distinguish betwee...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Murphy's Law or luck of the Irish? Disparate treatment of the Irish in 19th century courts

Using data on 100 years of 19th century criminal trials at London's Old Bailey, this paper offers clear evidence of disparate treatment of Irish-named defendants and victims by English juries. We measure surname Irishnes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who's got the power? Wage determination and its resilience in the Great Recession

Whereas wage inequality has risen markedly in most OECD countries in recent decades, it has fallen in several Southern European economies. To shed light on this phenomenon, we embed sectoral bargaining, which is common i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market size, markups and international price dispersion in the cement industry

Prices for several intermediate inputs, including cement, are higher in developing economies - particularly in Africa. Combining data from the International Comparison Program with a global directory of cement plants we ...Read more...

Journal article

Energy for Sustainable Development :

Assessing reliability of electricity grid services from space: the case of Uttar Pradesh, India

While most households around the world have access to electricity, the number of hours per day when the grid supplies them with adequate voltage can be low. Improving the reliability of electricity is crucial to make pro...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Inflation, market power, and price controls: views of leading economists

With sharply rising US inflation prompting debate about the potential role of powerful firms in driving up prices and whether antitrust interventions and/or price controls may be an effective policy response, the IGM For...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Health Planning and Management:

Medical disputes and patient satisfaction in China: how does hospital management matter?

Objective: Satisfaction with healthcare may be captured by surveys of patients and staff, or in extreme cases, the number and severity of medical disputes. This study tries to investigate the relationship between satisfa...Read more...

Journal article

Energy Economics:

Power outages and firm performance: a hydro-IV approach for a single electricity grid

We estimate the impact of power outages on firm performance using a hydro-instrumental variable strategy which integrates a river flow with a hydropower generation model and an electricity-grid-based distance interpolati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do carbon offsets offset carbon?

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies and use it to provide systematic evidence of the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism - the world's largest carbon offs...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Prices, policing and policy: the dynamics of crime booms and busts

In many historical episodes, the extent of criminal activity has displayed booms and busts. One very clear example is the case of metal crime, where in the face of big increases in value driven by world commodity prices,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The rise of agribusiness and the distributional consequences of policies on intermediated trade

Policies to encourage agribusinesses-led development of crop markets are high on the agenda of many policy-makers. Since the 1980s, several countries have moved to a model in which agribusinesses provide market access to...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Energy and climate change

UK greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are declining and have been declining for some time. As of 2018, the UK emitted 449 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e). That corresponds to a reduction of 43% relative to 1990 lev...Read more...

Journal article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications:

A tale of two tails: do Power Law and Lognormal models fit firm-size distributions in the mid-Victorian era?

The paper explores the frequency and size distributions of firm-size in a novel dataset for the mid-Victorian era from a recent extraction of the England and Wales population censuses of 1851, 1861, 1871, and 1881. The p...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

The changing returns to crime: do criminals respond to prices?

To what extent does crime follow the pattern of potential gains to illegal activity? This article presents evidence on how criminals respond to this key incentive by reporting crime-price elasticities estimated from a co...Read more...

Journal article

Urban Studies:

Does the law of one price hold for hedonic prices?

Hedonic prices of locational attributes in urban land markets are determined by a process of spatial arbitrage that is similar to that which underpins the law of one price. If hedonic prices deviate from their spatial eq...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Leveraging monopoly power by degrading interoperability: theory and evidence from computer markets

When will a monopolist have incentives to leverage her/his market power in a primary market to foreclose competition in a complementary market by degrading compatibility/interoperability of her/his products with those of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Increasing differences between firms: market power and the macro-economy

A rich understanding of macro-economic outcomes requires taking into account the large (and increasing) differences between firms. These differences stem in large part from heterogeneous productivity rooted in managerial...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:

Growth volatility and size: a firm-level study

This paper provides a systematic cross-country investigation of the relation between a firm's growth volatility and its size. For the first time the analysis is carried out using comparable and representative sets of dat...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Guarding the guardians

Good government requires some restraints on the powerful but how can those be imposed if there is no-one above them? This article studies the equilibrium allocation of power and resources established by self-interested i...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Does the presence of wind turbines have negative externalities for people in their surroundings? Evidence from well-being data

Throughout the world, governments foster the deployment of wind power to mitigate negative externalities of conventional electricity generation, notably CO2 emissions. Wind turbines, however, are not free of externalitie...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Firm size distortions and the productivity distribution: evidence from France

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The unbearable divergence of unemployment in Europe

Unemployment in Europe is not only ?too high?, it is also too different across countries that belong to a monetary union. In this paper we i) document this increasing heterogeneity, ii) try to explain it and iii) draw fr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Benford's law, families of distributions and a test basis

Benford's Law is used to test for data irregularities. While novel, there are two weaknesses in the current methodology. First, test values used in practice are too conservative and the test values of this paper are more...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Gibrat's Law and the British Industrial Revolution

This paper examines Gibrat?s law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat?s law broadly holds even in the face of population...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Size Distribution Across All 'Cities': A Unifying Approach

Older cities in the US tend to be larger than younger ones. The distribution of city sizes is, therefore, systematically related to the country's city age distribution. We introduce endogenous city creation into a dynami...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Model of Equilibrium Institutions

Institutions that serve the interests of an elite are often cited as an important reason for poor economic performance. This paper builds a model of institutions that allocate resources and power to maximize the payoff o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: True PPPs for 141 Countries

I set out a new method for estimating true (Konus) PPPs. Household consumption per head deflated by these PPPs answers the question: by how much must the average expenditure per head of poor country A be increased to ena...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Panic on the streets of London: police, crime, and the July 2005 terror attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime, looking at what happened to crime and police before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeploy...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Penn-Belassa-Samuelson Effect in Developing Countries: Price and Income Revisited

It is conventional wisdom that richer countries have a higher price level than poorer countries. This paper provides evidence that the price-income relationship is non-linear and that it turns negative, or at best flat, ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

From `Plan B? to `Plan V?: what the UK economy needs to reboot and rebalance growth

With the threat of stagflation and interest rate rises, the current economic climate shows little sign of improvement in the near future. John Van Reenen finds that the government?s severe austerity programme, with its v...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Organization of Firms Across Countries

We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sale...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime and the July 2005 Terror Attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of p...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Panic on the streets of London

The terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005 resulted in a very large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs. New research by Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt looks at the impact of this increased ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Zipf's Law for Cities: A Cross Country Investigation

This paper assesses the empirical validity of Zipf?s Law for cities, using new data on 73 countries and two estimation methods ? OLS and the Hill estimator. With either estimator, we reject Zipf?s Law far more often than...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The 'Network Economy' and Models of the Employment Contract: Psychological, Economic and Legal

The emergence of the so-called ?network economy? and the development of project-based work pose a fundamental challenge to established methods of regulating the employment relationship. There appears to be an unsatisfied...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Zipfs Law for Cities: An Empirical Examination

We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 u 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In...Read more...