Results

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

Teaching happiness (economics) in your dismal-science courses

This paper discusses ideas for incorporating the study of happiness and other measures of self-reported or subjective well-being (SWB) into undergraduate economics courses. We begin by motivating why students of economic...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tax simplicity or simplicity of evasion? Evidence from self-employment taxes in France

We use individual panel data and the introduction of simpler tax regimes for the self-employed in France to assess the extent to which individuals' shift towards the simpler tax regimes is driven by tax simplicity and by...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

The self-employment trap?

The seventh LSE-CEP survey of the self-employed was undertaken in June 2023. The results revealed that the self-employed are still in the doldrums and their incomes and activity have not resumed to pre-pandemic levels. T...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...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

From Covid-19 to collapse? The self-employed and the cost of living crisis

The sixth LSE-CEP survey of the self-employed was undertaken in November 2022 and found that the downward trend in income levels of the self-employed reported in May 2022 has continued. The cost of living crisis is hitti...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Supporting the UK's self-employed

Two years after the Covid-19 crisis began, incomes of the UK?s self-employed remain well below their pre-pandemic levels. Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura explain why the solo self-employed, who represent about 85% of ...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed - A two year update

The fifth LSE-CEP survey of the self-employed of May 2022 provides an up to date picture of how Covid-19 and its aftermath keep affecting the self-employed. The findings show that, although working on average a little mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accidents will happen: (de)regulation of health and safety legislation, workplace accidents and self employment

In 2015, the UK government exempted "low-risk" self-employed workers from legislation on workplace safety. This reversed a move two decades earlier that incorporated the self-employed more fully into the same regulatory ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Low pay and insecurity in the UK labour market

Minimum wage increases have driven down the incidence of low hourly pay, but there has been much less progress elsewhere for low earners. Low pay is widespread among the self-employed, who do not benefit from the minimum...Read more...

CentrePiece article

What lottery wins reveal about the gender gap

The UK has seen a rapid increase in self-employed workers over the last two decades, but only one-third are women. Sarah Fleche and colleagues analyse data on lottery winners to show that improving women's access to capi...Read more...

Journal article

Perspectives on Psychological Science:

Mental health during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic: a review and recommendations for moving forward

COVID-19 has infected millions of people and upended the lives of most humans on the planet. Researchers from across the psychological sciences have sought to document and investigate the impact of COVID-19 in myriad way...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Have you quit your New Year's resolution by Quitter's Day?

Many people make New Year's resolutions, but by mid-January most resolutions will have been left aside. Workouts are skipped in favour of Netflix. Salads are shunned in favour of pasta. And across the UK Dry January is r...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Earning less than before Covid-19, the self-employed struggle to make ends meet

Amid the renewed drives for economic growth, self-employed workers still struggle to recover fully from the COVID-19 crisis. Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura write that In September 2021, 28% of workers reported financ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Some of the self-employed are still struggling amid uncertainty about whether they could claim grants

The self-employed have not recovered from the pandemic despite five rounds of government support, find Robert Blackburn (University of Liverpool), Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura (LSE). More than a quarter are in financ...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed - 18 months into the crisis

A year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, growth and economic recovery are the latest watchwords amongst labour market commentators in the UK. In this report we continue to monitor the situation of the self-employed ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Have productivity and pay decoupled in the UK?

In the long-run at the macro level, the real pay of workers tends to follow labour productivity. In recent years, however, there have been concerns that this relationship has broken down and that pay has become "decouple...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: a longitudinal study of lottery wins

Would improving women's access to capital reduce the gender entrepreneurial gap? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we find that an increase ...Read more...

Journal article

Scandinavian Journal of Economics:

Living in the shadow of the past: financial profiles and well-being

We consider the link between individual financial profiles over time and well-being, as measured by life satisfaction. In particular, we look at annual self-reported financial worsening and improvement information for mo...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Covid-19 and self-employment

The pandemic has had particularly damaging economic effects on self-employed people in the UK. CEP has now run three surveys to capture the experience of these workers during the crisis. Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: a longitudinal study of lottery wins

Can capital constraints explain why there are more male than female entrepreneurs in most societies? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we fi...Read more...

Journal article

Business History:

Changes in Victorian entrepreneurship in England and Wales 1851-1911: methodology and business population estimates

The full population of England and Wales employers and own-account business proprietors is estimated using population censuses 1851?1911. The main contribution of the article is a method of mixed single imputation to ove...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Covid-19 and self-employment ten months into the crisis

Almost a year into the crisis, the latest lockdown has hit the self-employed hard in the UK. In January 2021, 57% of surveyed self-employed workers were earning less than A#1,000 per month, up from 31% in January 2020 an...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed - ten months into the crisis

Almost a year into the Covid-19 crisis, it has become widely acknowledged that UK self-employment has been particularly hard hit. Here we continue our series investigating the experience of self-employed workers througho...Read more...

Journal article

Business History:

The population of non-corporate business proprietors in England and Wales 1891?1911

This article uses population censuses to provide the first consistent counts of the population of business proprietors for 1891?1911. After appropriate adjustments for imperfect Census design the article confirms the per...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and the self-employed: six months into the crisis

Six months after Covid-19 first hit, it is clear that it is the greatest economic crisis of the modern age. The economy has contracted far more rapidly than in previous crises, with GDP dropping by a record 19.5 per cent...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements: a cross-country perspective on the changing composition of jobs

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work a...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Covid-19 and the future of self-employment

Jack Blundell reports how self-employed workers have been particularly hard hit by the crisis....Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Self-employment in the Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 shock is one of the largest economic shocks that has taken place in living memory. The crisis has served to highlight the challenges governments face in extending social insurance to self-employed workers, f...Read more...

Journal article

Education Policy Analysis Archives:

Using global observation protocols to inform research on teaching effectiveness and school improvement: strengths and emerging limitations

An essential feature of many modern teacher observation protocols is their ?global? approach to measuring instruction. Global protocols provide a summary evaluation of multiple domains of instruction from observers? over...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The UK's self-employed workers: who they are and what they need

One in seven people in the UK workforce is now in self-employment ? but this is a very diverse community. Jack Blundell is developing a typology of self-employed workers, which can then be used to assess differences in h...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Clusters in UK self-employment

UK Self-employment has soared in recent years. With existing labour market policy designed to cater for conventional employee relationships, policymakers in this field are increasingly seeking to better understand these ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The gig economy and workers' preferences for steady jobs

Is the rise of gig work, freelancing, zero hours contracts and self-employment a result of people wanting such work or because they have no other choice? Nikhil Datta finds that while workers in the gig economy may like ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Willing to pay for security: a discrete choice experiment to analyse labour supply preferences

This paper investigates the extent to which labour supply preferences are responsible for the marked rise in atypical work arrangements in the UK and US. By employing vignettes in a discrete job choice experiment in a re...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tax simplicity and heterogeneous learning

We study the effects of fiscal incentives for self-employment using new French tax data from 1994 to 2012. France serves as a good quasi-laboratory: It has three fiscal regimes - or modes of taxation - for the self-emplo...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Quantifying the sources of firm heterogeneity

We develop and structurally estimate a model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms that can be used to decompose the firm-size distribution into the contributions of costs, "appeal" (quality or taste), markups, and product...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

City of dreams

Higher ability workers benefit more from bigger cities while housing costs there are higher for everyone, and yet there is little sorting on ability. A possible explanation is that young individuals have an imperfect ass...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Eating disorders: the impact of self-image and peer pressure

We need government intervention to prevent a potential epidemic of eating disorders, according to a study by Joan Costa-i-Font and Mireia Jofre-Bonet. Their research confirms the widespread belief that the proliferation ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... 'Smart and illicit': the making of a successful entrepreneur

Smart teenagers who engage in illicit activities are much more likely to become entrepreneurs, according to research by Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein. But, they note, being self-employed doesn?t necessarily make someon...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Smart and illicit: who becomes an entrepreneur and does it pay?

We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between ?entrepreneurs? and other business owners. The incorporated self-employed have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncogniti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Winning big but feeling no better? The effect of lottery prizes on physical and mental health

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking)...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Better Rail Access Improve Homeowners? Happiness?: Evidence Based on Micro Surveys in Beijing

Development of urban transport infrastructures is a key policy focus---particularly in countries like China which have experienced fast urbanisation over the past decade. While existing studies provide marginal values fo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Transferable Scars: A Longitudinal Evidence of Psychological Impact of Past Parental Unemployment on Adolescents in the United Kingdom

Using a longitudinal data of British youths, this paper explores the consequences of past parental unemployment on the current happiness and self-esteem of the children. We find that a past unemployment spell of the fath...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Public Investment Spur the Land Market?: Evidence from Transport Improvement in Beijing

Over 140 billion CNY (1GBP=10CNY) has been spent between 2000 and 2012 in Beijing on the construction of new rail transit lines. This massive public investment allows me to examine the consequences of transport improveme...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Self-Employment Measure Entrepreneurship? Evidence from Great Britain

Research on entrepreneurship often uses information on self-employment to proxy for business creation and innovative behaviour. However, little evidence has been collected on the link between these measures. In this pape...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Anorexia, Body Image and Peer Effects: Evidence from a Sample of European Women

Excessive preoccupation with self-image (or identity) is regarded as a factor contributing to the proliferation of food disorders, especially among young women. This paper models how self-image and peer effects influence...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Are England?s Academies More Inclusive or More `Exclusive?? The Impact of Institutional Change on the Pupil Profile of Schools

In 2002 the former Labour government launched the Academies Programme of school improvement. This scheme has targeted entrenched issues of pupil underachievement within state secondary schools located in deprived areas, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Importance of Relative Performance Feedback Information: Evidence from a Natural Experiment using High School Students

We study the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance under piece-rate incentives. A natural experiment that took place in a high school offers an unusual opportunity to test this effe...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Students' academic self-perception

Participation rates in higher education differ persistently between some groups in society. Using two British datasets we investigate whether this gap is rooted in students? mis-perception of their own and other?s abilit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Self Selection of Migrant Workers Revisited

Work of low-skilled migrant workers from developing countries in developed economies is a growing phenomenon and a key political and economic issue. An extensive literature has found (for the most part) that these worker...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Self-Selection and the Performance of Return Migrants: the Source Country Perspective.

In this paper, using the framework of a Roy theoretical model, we examine the performance of return migrants in Albania. We ask two main questions: (i) Had they chosen not to migrate, what would be the performance of ret...Read more...