Results

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Post-Brexit trade policy hit supply chains and workers

After Brexit, firms in the UK found their supply chains disrupted. Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain and Martina Magli show that subsequent declines in trade led to less employment and lower pay for workers - with firms im...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Brexit shows how firms react when restrictions are placed on the way they reach customers

Brexit changed how British firms could sell services in the European Union. By studying how companies reacted, Holger Breinlich and Martina Magli show that many implemented workarounds, such as setting up affiliates abro...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

The lack of women at the top of the academic ladder is driven by unequal childcare responsibilities

Motherhood, and the unequal childcare responsibilities that follow, explain a large share of the observed gender gap in academic employment. Sofie Cairo, Ria Ivandic, Anne Sophie Lassen and Valentina Tartari find that th...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Leaders in social movements: evidence from unions in Myanmar

Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members' views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar's burgeoning labor ...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...

CEP discussion paper

Minimum wages and the nature of work

When minimum wage increases impose a cost shock on employers of low wage workers, there are a variety of ways in which firms can adjust. Rather than study the main focal point of much minimum wage research, possible labo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Internal pay equity and the quantity-quality trade-off in hiring

Firms face significant constraints in their ability to differentiate pay by worker productivity. We show how these internal equity constraints generate a quantity-quality trade-off in hiring: firms which offer higher wag...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Degrees of choice

Bolder applications mean that private school pupils end up at better universities than their exam results predict...Read more...

Blog

IFS Zooms in:

Is the minimum wage costing jobs? (podcast)

Alan Manning joins host Helen Miller and Eduin Latimer, both of the IFS, to unpack what we do and don't know about the minimum wage. They look at the evidence on employment effects, the knock-on impacts on pay compressio...Read more...

CEP report

Road to recovery: Self-employed on the mend?

The eighth LSE-CEP survey of the self-employed shows weekly hours of the self-employed are now seeing some signs of recovery, compared with the last data collection in June 2023. The positive increase in work hours is tr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How ICT shapes wages, working conditions, and job satisfaction

We study how the widespread diffusion of ICT affects wages, working conditions, and job satisfaction. We frame our empirical investigation with a model in which ICT can improve both wages and working conditions by increa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Minority bureaucrats' networks and career progression: evidence from the Chinese maritime customs service

Do minorities benefit from social networks? In this paper, we study this question using the historical example of China's first modern bureaucratic organization, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Drawing on newly dig...Read more...

Book

Why Immigration Policy Is Hard: And How to Make It Better
An indispensable resource for informed debate on one of the most charged subjects in public life today.

Immigration policy is hard, involving difficult decisions and trade-offs. But, as Alan Manning - former chair of the UK's Migration Advisory Committee - makes clear, this doesn't mean that we can't do much better. We sh...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What policies could kick-start economic growth in the UK?

For two decades, the UK economy has seen weak growth, driven by low business investment, inadequate market dynamism and persistent policy instability. These failures shape the daily reality of households whose living sta...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Supporting new fathers, Spanish style

Use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave combined with full pay is changing norms....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Putting a value on safety

What the pandemic reveals about the risks that people are willing to take at work....Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Manipulation and selection in unemployment insurance

In this paper, we study the selection patterns of individuals who manage to have their lay-off delayed around an age at lay-off threshold entitling them to four additional months of unemployment insurance, that is, manip...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU Talk (podcast):

Gender and the labour market

How much progress have we made in finding out the source of gender inequality at work? At the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford and CEPR gave the keynote lecture on 'Questions and...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Well designed paternity leave makes Spain a model of success

Spain recently equalised paternity and maternity leave at 16 weeks - but did fathers take advantage of the new policy? The answer is a resounding yes. Libertad Gonzalez, Lidia Farre, Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valen...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

People value workplace safety more than traditionally believed

Some workplaces are inherently more dangerous than others, but during the pandemic almost all workplaces became risky. Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig investigated whether workers during COVID chose to forgo earnings to ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Monopsony and the wage effects of migration

If labour markets are competitive, migration can only affect native wages via marginal products. But under imperfect competition, migration may also increase wage mark-downs ? if firms have greater monopsony power over m...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Background matters, but not whether parents are immigrants: outcomes of children born in Denmark

In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade diversion and labor market outcomes

In 2018 and 2019, the US administration increased tariffs on imports from China. Did these tariffs lead to more US imports from other countries such as Mexico? Using highly disaggregated data on the universe of Mexican f...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The US-China trade war created jobs (elsewhere)

In June 2016, Donald Trump justified the protectionist policies during his first administration as "the quickest way to bring our jobs back to our country". This column shows that while the trade war with China failed to...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Technical change, jobs, and wages in the global economy

This paper presents a compact and intuitive framework that consolidates, simplifies, and extends results on the links between technology, trade, and labour market outcomes. It makes three main contributions. First, it pr...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Why are women paid less than men? New research in South Africa shows the company you work for makes the biggest difference

Why do women earn less than men? The usual suspects - occupation, hours, experience - explain some of it. But a powerful, often overlooked reason is simply this: where women work. The companies that hire them play a huge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration demand, supply and sectoral heterogeneity in the UK labour market

The empirical migration literature often identifies the labor market effects of immigration using exogenous variation of migration concentration across sectors or regions. However, this approach differences out macroecon...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Better unemployment benefits could boost productivity and growth

The UK's job seeker's allowance for those who lose their job is much lower than the OECD average. Aadya Bahl argues that improving unemployment support is key not just for protecting workers but also for unlocking econom...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics :

Vacancy duration and wages

We estimate the elasticity of vacancy duration with respect to posted wages, using data from the near-universe of online job adverts in the United Kingdom. Our research design identifies duration elasticities by leveragi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Revving up wages: How rising productivity has benefited car industry workers

Fast productivity growth in the UK car industry led to staff in the sector earning about 37% more than the average manufacturing employee by the 2010s. But Andreas Teichgraeber and Tim Obermeier show that while wages wen...Read more...

CEP report

Minimum wage effects: adjustment through labour market dynamics and alternative work arrangements

This report investigates the UK's 2016 National Living Wage (NLW) introduction, focusing on firm adjustment through labour market transitions and job contract amendments. The NLW boosted worker wages, and whilst there wa...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

A practical guide to shift-share instruments

A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Firm and worker responses to extensions in paid maternity leave

This paper investigates how firms and workers respond to a voluntary government-funded program increasing the duration of paid maternity leave from four to six months in Brazil. We show that larger, higher-paying, and mo...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Do cities and regions gain from public sector relocation?

Moving public agencies out of London was a major plank of the levelling-up agenda. The effects on local economies seem smaller than hoped - and it's important to compare them with those of other tools of regional policy:...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring quality of life under spatial frictions

Using a quantitative spatial model as a data-generating process, we explore how spatial frictions affect the measurement of quality of life. We find that under a canonical parameterization, mobility frictions - generated...Read more...

Journal article

PNAS:

How working from home reshapes cities

In recent decades, economic activity has become increasingly concentrated in major global metropolises. Yet, the rise of working from home threatens this dominance of cities. Using multiple high-frequency datasets on spe...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The productivity boom in the British car industry benefited workers, with a caveat

Productivity growth can play an important role in raising wages. The UK car industry experienced fast productivity growth over the past 40 years, and by the 2010s car workers were earning about 37 per cent more than the ...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Reservation wages and the wage flexibility puzzle

Using micro data for the UK and Germany, we provide novel evidence on the cyclical properties of reservation wages and estimate that wages and reservation wages are characterised by moderate and very similar degrees of c...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...

Blog

LSE USAPP:

How women-owned employment agencies in the 1950s and 1960s helped women to get better jobs and better pay

When employers discriminate against women, whether through prejudice or ignorance, women are paid less and miss out on higher-quality jobs. Historically, one way of dealing with this discrimination was for women to set u...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigrant downgrading: new evidence from UK panel data

We examine the wage and occupation outcomes for cohorts of immigrants who arrived in the UK since 2002. Using the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) with a matched migrant identifier, we can follow a 1% sample of...Read more...

Journal article

Research in Transportation Economics:

Housing prices, buses and trams in Medellin (Colombia)

This paper aims to establish the impact of two medium-capacity transportation systems (MCTS) on housing prices in Medellin (Colombia): Metroplus, a bus rapid transit (BRT) system, and Tranvia, a tramway system. Using rep...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Open Economics:

Firms and inequality

We review the existing literature on falling business dynamism and present a new analysis using comprehensive UK firm-level panel data. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a large increase in UK firm-level inequality (es...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Open Economics:

Labour market inequality

Wage and earnings inequality has been on the rise in the United Kingdom (UK) since the late 1970s/early 1980s, and with faster increases than comparator countries, it is now one of the countries with the highest levels o...Read more...

Blog

What works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Why the new government needs to be clearheaded on local growth

There are lots of local disparities in the UK. Health, education, levels of crime, employment rates and more diverge significantly across places. These disparities came into focus at the time of the 2019 election, where ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The effect of productivity growth on within-firm inequality

Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the US since the 1970s, largely driven by within-firm earnings inequality. This column uses combined data from three large micro datasets to study the drivers and implication...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

An engine of (pay) growth? Productivity and wages in the UK auto industry

When labour market competition is imperfect, positive industry (and firm) productivity shocks can be passed through to workers in the form of higher wages. We document how the UK auto industry, following a period of decl...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Real wages, inequality and living standards

Real wage growth has stagnated. Policies which boost productivity or halt and reverse the trend to more employer power in wage bargaining are important in getting the UK out of the stagnation trap....Read more...

CEP election analysis

Work, wages and inactivity

The recent aggregate performance of the UK labour market looks good. But aggregate performance often obscures important changes around averages. Inequality along several dimensions remains a persistent feature of the UK ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The national minimum wage: 25 years on

It is now just over a quarter of a century since a national minimum wage was introduced in the UK. Once a source of controversy due to fears that it would lead to fewer jobs, the policy has instead proved to be highly su...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Task-based discrimination

We develop a task-based model of occupational sorting to identify and quantify the effect of discrimination, racial skill gaps, and aggregate task prices on Black-White differences in labor market outcomes over time. At ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Government contracting and living wages > minimum wages

Government procurement accounts for a significant share of GDP, and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) clauses in government contracts have become common across developed economies. This paper studies o...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Minimum wage for South African farm workers: study shows 2013 hike helped reduce poverty even though compliance was poor

Minimum wage policies are typically aimed at reducing poverty. Yet there is little direct evidence of this effect, especially in developing countries. And none for South Africa, write Ihsaan Bassier and Vimal Ranchhod....Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The linear algebra of economic geography models

We provide sufficient statistics for nominal and real wage exposure to productivity shocks in a constant elasticity economic geography model. These exposure measures summarize the first-order general equilibrium elastici...Read more...

External report

Labour Economics: Thinking through Labour's economic agenda

With the Labour Party having vowed to achieve the fastest growth in the G7, the Social Market Foundation has brought together leading economic experts to provide independent analysis of the party's proposed approach - an...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

Labor market returns to higher education

The persistent high wage premium associated with college education, despite increasing participation rates, continues to generate a great deal of academic and policy interest. While it is widely agreed that the financia...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...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The national minimum wage - 25 years on

This month marks 25 years since a national minimum wage was introduced in the UK. Once a controversial policy, due to fears that it would lead to fewer jobs, it has instead proven to be highly successful. The minimum wag...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Do wages underestimate the inequality in workers' rewards? The joint distribution of job quality and wages across occupations

Information on both wages and job quality is needed in order to understand the occupational dispersion of wellbeing. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large UK sample to construct a measure of `overall reward?, the su...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

The great divergence(s)

This paper provides new evidence on the increasing dispersion in wages and productivity using a unique micro-aggregated firm-level data source, representative for the full population of firms in 12 countries. First, we d...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The persisting pay gap and the motherhood penalty

Despite progress in gender equality, the pay gap continues to be a major challenge. Policymakers are yet to understand the nuances and intricate mechanics of why women's earnings take a hit after they become mothers, arg...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The 'child penalty' creates most of the gender earnings gaps in rich countries

After having children, women tend to change their working hours and wage rates, and even transition to new jobs. This phenomenon, known as the child penalty, explains the bulk of the gender earnings gap in developed coun...Read more...

Journal article

LSE Public Policy Review:

Wage controversies: real wage stagnation, inequality and labour market institutions

Weak real wage growth, low wage work and higher wage inequality than the past are features of contemporary labour markets the world over. Longstanding wage controversies in economics are of relevance to them. This paper ...Read more...

External report

Old Skills, New Skills - what is changing in the UK labour market?

The UK, along with other industrial countries, is experiencing rapid technological change associated with robotics and artificial intelligence, precipitating significant transformations in terms of how work is organised,...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How where you live affects your pay

Tackling inequality between regions within a country has become a political priority across much of the advanced world. Luis Bauluz, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Filip...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Ending stagnation

What can be done to address Britain?s relative economic decline over the past decade and a half? The final report of the Economy 2030 Inquiry presents an ambitious strategy for reversing decades of under-investment, by t...Read more...

CEP Insights

Insights: condensed

The Insights series is an introduction to the work of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). Each Insight highlights the contribution of CEP researchers to both academic understanding and policymaking in one area of ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy :

Local retail prices, product variety, and neighborhood change

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-ba...Read more...

External report

The state of the UK economy 2024

The state of the UK economy is always an important matter, but it is all the more so in what looks likely to be an election year. This UK in a Changing Europe report takes stock of the UK economy in order to assess how i...Read more...

Blog

Notes from Poland:

Six myths about inequality in Poland

Pawel Bukowski discusses and debunks some of the common misconceptions regarding inequality in Poland....Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Why household income doesn't tell the full story on individual wellbeing

The literature on inequality often focuses on household income, but this measure has several limitations for assessing individual wellbeing. Tim Obermeier develops a new collective household model which simultaneously ac...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

Dashboards have the power to make complex research accessible to the public and policymakers

While researchers often point to the relevance of their research, economic models and econometric methods are typically inaccessible to a wider audience. Gabriel Ahlfeldt explains how interactive dashboards represent a u...Read more...

External report

Ending stagnation

The UK has great strengths, but is a decade and a half into a period of stagnation. The toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was straining the living standards of low- and middle-income Britain well befor...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

A micro-geographic house price index for England and Wales

We generate a mix-adjusted house price index for England and Wales from 2010 to 2020 at the level of lower-layer super output areas. To this end, we blend parametric and non-parametric estimation techniques and leverage ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The skyscraper revolution: global economic development and land savings

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17,...Read more...

Book

Handbook of the Economics of Education
Volume 7

Handbook of the Economics of Education, Volume Seven describes the research frontier in key topical areas and sets the agenda for further work. Sections in this new release include Methods for Measuring School Effectiven...Read more...

External report

Applying the Robbins Principle to further education and apprenticeship

Britain does well at higher education, and badly for its non-graduates. The main problem is our failure to train more people when they are young. Shockingly, 30 per cent of 18 year olds are not in education or training -...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

What Claudia Goldin taught economics about women, labour markets and pay gaps

When Claudia Goldin's research on women's work became influential in the 1980s, the study of gender was far from mainstream in economics. Four decades later, that is no longer the case, in large part thanks to her influe...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The trouble with inactivity

Concerns about a recent rise in economic inactivity have prompted new policies aimed at discouraging early retirement and encouraging the labour force participation of women with young children. Stephen Machin and Jonath...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

What happens to people when machines replace them in the workplace?

New technologies are replacing workers in a growing range of occupations, causing loss of earnings and employment. However, these losses are smaller than those suffered by workers who experience mass layoffs. Per-Anders ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Gender gaps from labour market shocks

Many workers will face unemployment at some point during their careers and research shows that job loss can lead to persistently lower earnings. But that research is chiefly about men. Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Wages and vacancy duration

In a dynamic labour market, employer market power is jointly determined by the entry and exit margins of labour supply - ie the extent to which higher wages ease recruitment and improve rentention. Ihsaan Bassier, Alan M...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Are the self-employed trapped?

Still affected by the cost-of-living crisis, the self-employed are still struggling to recover their finances and mental health. Many of them would leave for a salaried job, yet they appear to be stuck in self-employment...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vacancy duration and wages

We estimate the elasticity of vacancy duration with respect to posted wages, using data from the near-universe of online job adverts in the United Kingdom. Our research design identifies duration elasticities by leveragi...Read more...

CEP Insights

Social mobility

How much of an individual's success depends on their own hard work and how much on what their parents do for a living? A country where children from poor families are likely to be poor as adults and elite positions in so...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The trouble with inactivity

Elevated concerns over the consequences of recent rises in the UK economic inactivity rate for growth, wages and prices have prominently featured in recent public debate about the labour market and the economy. This pape...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Improving the lives of low-paid workers

The ramping up of the national minimum wage since 2015 has more than halved the share of low-paid employees in Britain. But it is far from job done: too few low-paying jobs offer dignity, respect and security to the peop...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Should the UK government get active about economic inactivity?

Concerns about a rise in economic inactivity have prompted new policies aimed at discouraging early retirement and encouraging the labour force participation of women with young children. Such interventions would be more...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The local labor market effects of modern manufacturing capital: evidence from France

Using an event study methodology and comprehensive micro data from the French manufacturing sector, we analyze the local labor market effects of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation te...Read more...

External report

Low pay Britain 2023

After a decade and a half of relative economic decline, Britain needs a new economic strategy. This paper considers what it would mean to put good work centre stage. It requires us to go far beyond the narrow focus this ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Non-compete agreements in a rigid labour market: the case of Italy

Non-compete clauses (NCCs) limiting the mobility of workers have been found to be rather widespread in the US, a flexible labour market with large turnover rates and a limited coverage of collective bargaining. This pape...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Women in the workplace: 50 years of change

Decades of progress have seen greater opportunities for women in the workplace, but sizeable gender gaps remain in most indicators of economic achievement. Stefania Albanesi, Claudia Olivetti, and Barbara Petrongolo revi...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

Working from home and corporate real estate

We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the take-off of teleworking. We develop an index for the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Growth and immigration: unpicking the confusion

More people in a country leads to a bigger economy, but not necessarily an improved standard of living. Alan Manning unpicks the complexities in the debate....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Commute and thrive

The advent of commuting in 1930s London opened up opportunities to working-class people. Andrew Seltzer and Jonathan Wadsworth show how public transport boosts the labour market....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Self-employment dwindles amid the cost-of-living crisis

As the Covid-19 crisis has made way for inflation and skyrocketing energy prices, the self-employed have not yet found their way out of the recent economic adversities. And many of them are now finding their way out of s...Read more...

Blog

LSE American Politics and Policy:

For the US to again become the "Land of Opportunity" we need a better understanding of how geography and industrial change affects incomes

Kohei Takeda unpacks the relationship between declining manufacturing in parts of the US - which are often termed the 'Rust Belt' - and workers' income mobility....Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Pay inequality is high in South Africa: bosses are part of the problem

South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This income inequality is mostly due to high unemployment and large differences in wages. In South Africa today, economists and policy-makers typically foc...Read more...

Book

Handbook of the Economics of Education
Volume 6

The Handbook of the Economics of Education describes the research frontier in key topical areas and sets the agenda for further work. Modern analysis in the economics of education has made tremendous strides in understan...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics :

Micro-geographic property price and rent indices

We develop a programming algorithm that predicts a balanced-panel mix-adjusted house price index for arbitrary spatial units from repeated cross-sections of geocoded micro data. The algorithm combines parametric and non-...Read more...