Results

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Fiscal and education spillovers from charter school expansion

Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from noncharter schools? We provide new evidence on the fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for noncharter students in Massachusetts, which...Read more...

Blog

Bruegel:

Pitfalls to avoid as the EU ramps up defence investment

The European Union's push to rearm in the face of growing external threats and the increasing disengagement of the United States has, so far, been primarily a push to spend more on defence and to find ways to facilitate ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Design-based fiscal stimulus transfers: Evidence and macro implications

In recent years, and during Covid-19 in particular, many countries have experimented with innovative approaches to fiscal stimulus. This column reports on an experiment in France in which individuals were given a debit c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dissecting the sinews of power: international trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal-military state, 1689-1823

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of dome...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...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Budget 2020: a bold response to coronavirus, but more must be done if it becomes widespread in the UK

While the 2020 Budget offers an overall adequate response to the challenges currently posed by coronavirus, there are three issues that need to be addressed further, especially as the outbreak becomes more widespread, wr...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

Financing local police spending in England and Wales: fiscal federalism in practice

Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have been able to raise revenues locally to supplement grants from central government. We analyse the variation across police force areas in locally raised police revenues o...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...

Journal article

China and World Economy:

Fiscal subsidy policy on home appliances: its effects on domestic consumption and exports in China

This paper evaluates the effects of the Home Appliances Going to the Countryside (HAGC) policy, a fiscal subsidy program implemented in China to boost private consumption of home appliances in rural areas from 2007 to 20...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Technology gaps, trade and income

This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level tech...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (?nature?) versus environment (?nurture?). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million invento...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fiscal and education spillovers from charter school expansion

The fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for non-charter students are central issues in the debate over charter schools. Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter sc...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Multinationals and the customs union

Leaving the customs union may lead multinationals to move out of the UK, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs. That is the conclusion of research by Paola Conconi. She explains that in a customs union, goods cross ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

From final goods to inputs: the protectionist effect of rules of origin

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those o...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Investing in roads

Between 1990 and 2010, China constructed an extensive modern road network, including a national system of limited access highways. Vernon Henderson and colleagues investigate the impact on the growth of Chinese cities an...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Highways, Market Access and Urban Growth in China

We investigate the effects of the construction of the national highway system in China on local economic outcomes. The analysis employs three main approaches. The first is based on a structural model of Ricardian trade t...Read more...

CEP US election analysis

Inequality and opportunity: the return of a neglected debate

During this election period many Americans are feeling angry towards the very rich, especially those working in the financial sector, who helped cause the Great Recession and yet were bailed out by the government. Increa...Read more...

CEP report

Fiscal consolidation during a depression

In 2009-10, the UK's budget deficit was about 11 per cent of GDP. A credible plan for fiscal consolidation was introduced in the UK over the fiscal years 2011-12 to 2016-17. In this paper, we assess the impact of the sca...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Growth and productivity: UK economic performance since 1997

A common view is that the performance of the UK economy between 1997 and 2010 under Labour was very weak and that the current economic problems are a consequence of poor policies in this period. In this report, we analys...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Household Effects of Government Spending

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fiscal Multipliers over the Business Cycle

This paper illustrates why fiscal policy becomes more effective as unemployment rises in recessions. The theory is based on the equilibrium unemployment model of Michaillat (forthcoming), in which jobs are rationed in re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gravity Redux: Measuring International Trade Costs with Panel Data

Barriers to international trade are known to be large but due to data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem I derive a micro-founded meas...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Tax Competition Among Local Governments: Evidence from a Property Tax Reform in Finland

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Is Fiscal Decentralization Harmful for Economic Growth? Evidence from the OECD Countries

The global drive towards decentralization has been increasingly justified on the basis that greater transfers of resources to subnational governments are expected to deliver greater efficiency in the provision of public ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Oil Windfalls Improve Living Standards? Evidence from Brazil

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can Family-Support Policies Help Explain Differences in Working Hours Across Countries?

It has been suggested in the literature that taxes and subsidies play an important role in explaining the differences in working hours across countries. In this paper I test whether public programmes for family support p...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Decentralization Matter for Regional Disparities? A Cross-Country Analysis

This paper looks at the relationship between fiscal and political decentralization and the evolution of regional inequalities in a panel of 26 countries ? 19 developed and 7 developing ? for the period between 1990 and 2...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the International Dimension of Fiscal Policy

This paper analyses the international dimension of fiscal policy using a small open economy framework in which the government finances its spending by levying distortionary taxation and issuing non-state-contingent debt....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Robustly Optimal Monetary Policy

This paper analyses optimal monetary policy in response to shocks using a model that avoids making specific assumptions about the stickiness of prices, and thus the nature of the Phillips curve. Nonetheless, certain robu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Seigniorage

In this paper I analyse four different but related concepts, each of which highlights some aspect of the way in which the state acquires command over real resources through its ability to issue fiat money. They are (1) s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Designing Target Rules for International Monetary Policy Cooperation

This study analyzes a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities, monopolistic competition and producer currency pricing. A quadratic approximation to the utility of the consumers is derived an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Inflation, Inequality and Social Conflict

This paper presents a political economy model of inflation as a result of social conflict. Agents are heterogeneous in terms of income. Agents? income levels determine their ability to hedge against the effects of inflat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Fallacy of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

It is not common for an entire scholarly literature to be based on a fallacy, that is, 'on faulty reasoning; misleading or unsound argument'. The 'fiscal theory of the price level', recently re-developed by Woodford,...Read more...