Results

CEP discussion paper

Neighborhood effects: evidence from wartime destruction in London

We use the German bombing of London during the Second World War as an exogenous source of variation to provide evidence on neighborhood effects. We construct a newly-digitized dataset at the level of individual buildings...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Housing

Housing affordability is a key concern of an ever-larger fraction of UK voters who are crammed into artificially limited space. It also underlies the sense of being shut out of prosperity and unable to escape declining l...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Second home investments

Investment in second homes has been surging around the world. Christian Hilber explores the underlying causes of this boom and the political backlash against wealthy investors. His analysis explains how one increasingly ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic impacts of constraining home investments

We investigate how political backlash against wealthy investors in high-amenity places affects local residents. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment: the `Swiss Second Home Initiative?, which banned the construction of ...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

How English care homes have coped with the National Living Wage

Giulia Giupponi is an ESRC-funded PhD student at the London School of Economics and a research assistant at the Centre for Economic Performance. Stephen Machin is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Agglomeration externalities and urban growth controls

How can land use policy enhance the exploitation of external urban agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we show that the second-best land use policy constrains city creation, while subsidizing (t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Housing Market Impacts of Constraining Second Home Investments

We investigate how political backlash against wealthy second home investors in high-amenity places ? tourist areas or superstar cities ? affects local residents. We develop a general equilibrium model and exploit a quasi...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

How Far Do England?s Second-Order Cities Emulate London as Human-Capital `Escalators??

In the urban resurgence accompanying the growth of the knowledge economy, second-order cities appear to be losing out to the principal city, especially where the latter is much larger and benefits from substantially grea...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Great Britain's Second-Order City Regions in Recessions, 1978-2010

While it is now accepted that the 2008-09 recession accentuated regional differences in Britain, it is more difficult to identify the role of major cities, especially over a longer time scale. Using previously establishe...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Agglomeration Externalities and Urban Growth Controls

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a ...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...

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

Second-Order Approximation of Dynamic Models with Time-Varying Risk

This paper provides first and second-order approximation methods for the solution of nonlinear dynamic stochastic models in which the exogenous state variables follow conditionally-linear stochastic processes displaying ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Inflation Premium and Oil Price Volatility

This paper provides a fully micro-founded New Keynesian framework to study the interaction between oil price volatility, pricing behavior of firms and monetary policy. We show that when oil has low substitutability, firm...Read more...