Results

CEP discussion paper

Elite universities and the intergenerational transmission of human and social capital

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, ...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...

CEP election analysis

Further and higher education

There are not enough graduates for sectors in which the UK has a comparative advantage and there are too few people educated to sub-degree level compared to other countries....Read more...

CEP election analysis

Schools

Schools in England, and the UK as a whole, need greater investment. Failure to do so puts economic growth in jeopardy as well as worsening social mobility....Read more...

CentrePiece article

in brief... Why representation in economics matters

To inspire the next generation of black economists, how important is it for them to see people like themselves working in the profession? Felicia Odamtten, an economist at the Resolution Foundation and founder of The Bla...Read more...

CentrePiece article

A generation scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic

The impact of the pandemic on education means that pupils in England are on course for lower GCSE grades well into the 2030s. Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite and Stephen Machin say that the school system ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Taking Back Control? Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Retirement on Locus of Control

We use Australian panel data to examine the impact of retirement on individual locus of control, a socio-emotional skill with substantial explanatory power for a broad range of life outcomes. Exploiting the eligibility a...Read more...

External publication

A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era

We present for the first time a model of children's evolving socio-emotional and cognitive skills to assess how the educational and lifetime prospects of children of different ages, genders and socio-economic backgrounds...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

A class apart: prime ministers' origins profoundly impact their political worldviews

The background of our Prime Ministers hugely influences the judgements they make. Yet our leaders are drawn from an astonishingly narrow slice of society: every PM who attended an English university since WW2 went to Oxf...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Intergenerational income mobility in France: A comparative and geographic analysis

The question of the extent to which individuals' incomes are related to those of their parents has seen renewed interest as rising income inequality raises concerns about equality of opportunity. Gustave Kenedi and Louis...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

The Employment and Distributional Impacts of Nationwide Minimum Wage Changes

We estimate the effect of the introduction of the UK’s National Living Wage in 2016, and increases in it up to 2019, using a new empirical method. We apply a bunching approach to a setting with no geographical variation ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association :

Formation of College Plans: Expected Returns, Preferences and Adjustment Process

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study the formation, and updating, of educational plans, and to examine how these plans ultimately impact later educational attainment. Using novel, longitudinal, microdata on cohort...Read more...

Blog

LSE EUROPP:

Online tutoring can transform education for disadvantaged students

Online tutoring programmes have emerged as an effective strategy for narrowing the educational gaps that were exacerbated by the pandemic. Claudia Hupkau, Lucas Gortazar and Antonio Roldan-Mones outline how an eight-week...Read more...

Blog

Wonkhe:

The spiralling costs of higher education are hitting stay at home students harder

Commuter students face financial struggle and a growing sense of isolation from campus. Lee Elliot Major introduces the findings of a new student money and wellbeing survey....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Do publicly funded autonomous schools improve education systems in the world?

In recent decades, many countries have established autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools. Natalie Irmert, Jan Bietenbeck, Linn Mattisson and Felix We...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...

Journal article

Nature Human Behaviour:

Consumption responses to an unconditional child allowance in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic put families in the United States under financial stress. The federal government's largest response in 2021 was the American Rescue Plan Act, which temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in...Read more...

Journal article

Advances in Health Care Management:

Safe Surgery Checklist Implementation: Associations of Management Practice and Safety Culture Change

Designing and developing safe systems has been a persistent challenge in health care, and in surgical settings in particular. In efforts to promote safety, safety culture, i.e., shared values regarding safety management,...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

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization:

Does growing up in economic hard times increase compassion? The case of attitudes towards immigration

There is some evidence that people who grew up in economic hard times more strongly favor government redistribution and are more compassionate towards the poor. We investigate how inclusive this increase in compassion is...Read more...

Blog

Higher Education Policy Institute:

Confronting higher education's class divide

Lee Elliot Major explains why developing an equity approach in higher education is the only way we will ever level the learning playing field - and lays out three simple steps we can take to achieve this....Read more...

Journal article

PLOS ONE :

Access to digital finance: Equity crowdfunding across countries and platforms

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding ...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics: Forthcoming

Social restrictions, leisure and well-being

A wide-ranging public debate surrounds how pandemic lockdown measures differentially impacted individuals and which precise mechanisms – whether financial-, health-, or policy-driven – predominate in determining these ef...Read more...

External publication

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...

Journal article

British Education Research Journal:

The path increasingly travelled: Vocational entry qualifications, socioeconomic status and university outcomes

Many countries have introduced flexibility in their admissions equivalents for tertiary education, allowing students to apply with vocational rather than academic qualifications at upper secondary level. However, entrant...Read more...

Blog

South-West Social Mobility Commission's Substack:

Fixing a broken tongue

Lee Elliot Major explains why the language we use in education is important to challenge the divides that scar the education system....Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Youth custody: who ends up there and how does it affect their later lives?

There are severe long-term consequences for young people in the UK who spend time in youth custody, the majority of whom are boys. Those with very low grades, in special education facilities and with additional education...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The rising tide of school absences in the post-pandemic era

New research reveals that school attendance in the UK is still well below the pre-pandemic norm. Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite and Lee Elliot Major outline the scale of continued absenteeism among pupils across the count...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Labor Economics:

Long Social Distancing

Many Americans continued some forms of social distancing after the pandemic. This phenomenon is stronger among older persons, less educated individuals, and those who interact daily with persons at high risk from infecti...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

Explaining the Mathematics Gender Gap: The Role of Stereotypes

Descriptive stereotypes such as “girls are not good at mathematics” or prescriptive stereotypes, that is, fixed views about women’s societal roles, can explain the persistent gender gap in mathematics. Stereotypes lower ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics: Forthcoming

Estimating students' valuation for college experiences

Quantifying the consumption value of college - the utility students derive from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities - has been challenging. We leverage the COVID-19 shock to elicit students' intended li...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...

Blog

FE News:

The childcare revolution: a new opportunity for parental partnerships in child learning

Lee Elliot Major discusses how teacher-parent partnerships can help make the UK's childcare system more effective and provides three policy recommendations the government can implement....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are the upwardly mobile more left-wing?

It is well-known that the wealthier are more likely to have Right-leaning political preferences. We here in addition consider the role of the individual's starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The rising tide of school absences in the post-pandemic era

While many presumed school attendance levels would recover rapidly from the impact of the pandemic, new research reveals the scale of continued absenteeism among school pupils across the country. Andrew Eyles, Esme Lilly...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Thinking through social infrastructure wider outcomes

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino discusses the indirect effects of social infrastructure on communities, as part of the What works Centre for Local Economic Growth's 'thinking through series' which focuses on how local policymakers...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Which educational policies are most effective for equalising opportunities?

Against a backdrop of poor productivity growth, severe skill shortages and increasing educational inequalities in the UK since the pandemic, investment in education and skills is essential. It requires policies that span...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Mapping changes in educational achievement across England

As part of the LSE Festival 2023, the Mapping People and Change exhibition visualises data through maps on various socio-economic issues, providing insights into the impact of a rapidly changing world on people and commu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Peer pressure and manager pressure in organisations

We study the interaction between horizontal (peer) and vertical (manager) social factors in workers' motivation. In our setting, individuals work using open-plan desks. Using a natural experiment, we identify a sharp inc...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics: Forthcoming

The long shadow of local decline: birthplace economic adversity and long-term individual outcomes in the UK

Does growing up in a high-economic adversity area matter for individual economic, cultural, and political views? Despite a significant focus upon the effect of birthplace on economic outcomes, there is less evidence on h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Long social distancing

Many working-age Americans say they will continue some forms of social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. We uncover this long social distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Atti...Read more...

Book

Free and Equal
What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

Imagine: you are designing a society, but you don't know who you'll be within it - rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like? This is the revolutionary thought experiment...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

How women are changing the face of economics

Economics continues to be a discipline dominated by men. Yet trailblazing female economists are working to change that. Myung Jin explains why it is important to improve diversity and equality within the field....Read more...

CentrePiece article

The recent evolution of apprenticeships

The quality of apprenticeships in England has improved in recent years, but take-up has dropped. Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura show how these changes mean that those from disadvantaged neighbourho...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...

Journal article

International Economic Review:

2022 Klein Lecture - Parental education and invention: the Finnish enigma

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the United States but also in Finland, which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45 M Finnish individu...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...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization : Forthcoming

Who promotes gender-sensitive policies?

We study whether female-headed local governments in Spain are more likely to engage in gender sensitive policies such as long-term care support, pre-schooling, or work and family-life balancing services. Using a fuzzy re...Read more...

Chapter

Educational inequality

in Handbook of the economics of education

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socioeconomi...Read more...

Journal article

Scandinavian Journal of Economics: Forthcoming

Where is the land of hope and glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

This paper presents a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata focusing on occupation, home ownership, and education. Four main results ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Unequal education and the 'Great Gatsby Curve'

In modern economies, people's livelihoods are based in large part on skills acquired through education. Unequal education therefore drives both inequality in the labour market and low social mobility across generations. ...Read more...

Blog

Harvard Business Review:

The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

There's a view out there - call it the "superhero" theory of leadership - in which the individual vision, charisma, and brilliance of a CEO makes or breaks a company. That view is dangerous - not so much because CEOs don...Read more...

Chapter

Housing policy and affordable housing

in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities throughout the world. The main underlying cause for the "affordability crisis," which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of ...Read more...

Journal article

NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery:

How health care professionals view their organizations' governance and decision-making.

A survey of the NEJM Catalyst Insights Council finds that health care organizations' strategic priorities have held steady - with even more emphasis on financial returns. Now including global data....Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine: Forthcoming

The impact of Covid-19 lockdown stringency on loneliness in five European countries

The coronavirus pandemic has forced governments to implement a variety of different dynamic lockdown-stringency strategies in the last two years. Extensive lockdown periods could have potential unin- tended consequences ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Clean technologies for growth and equity

Public investment in developing energy sources that don't cause climate change is a strategy for economic growth that could also contribute to the UK's levelling up agenda, says Ralf Martin. His analysis indicates that s...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The impact of school closures on educational inequality

Nearly all schools closed at some point during the Covid-19 pandemic. Reviewing the international evidence to date on the impact of these closures, Jo Blanden, Matthias Doepke and Jan Stuhler warn that they will substant...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Stagnation nation

Even before the cost of living crisis, a toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was threatening UK living standards, particularly for families on low and middle incomes. The Economy 2030 Inquiry is examinin...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Policies for affordable housing: options and obstacles

The crisis of housing affordability has been mounting for decades, driven by growing demand for properties in desirable areas where supply is limited. Numerous policies have been enacted across countries, but many are in...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Rising school absences: the post pandemic education divide

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the equalising power of schooling. Over 28% of primary and 40% of secondary school pupils who qualified for free school meals were persistently absent during the 2021/22 autumn term....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Charity in the time of austerity: in search of the 'Big Society'

The years after the election of the UK's coalition government in 2010 saw a decline in central funding to local government and a fall in expenditure on a range of local services, including social services. These cuts wer...Read more...

Blog

UK in a changing Europe:

The Johnson legacy: education

Andrew Eyles explains that while the government's goals in education policy have been ambitious and are to be applauded, the policies in place fall short of the targets set out as part of the broader levelling up agenda....Read more...

External publication

Education Inequalities

Education is one of the most important predictors of people's life chances. Better-educated people are more likely to be in work and tend to earn more, and the influence of education does not stop there. Education shapes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Social push and the direction of innovation

Innovators are intrinsically-motivated individuals who use ideas to create new goods and services. This raises the possibility that their social backgrounds may affect the direction of their innovative activity. Consiste...Read more...

External publication

Stagnation nation: navigating a route to a fairer and more prosperous Britain

The UK has great strengths, but is over a decade into a period of stagnation. The toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was posing challenges for low-to-middle income Britain's living standards even before...Read more...

Journal article

Nature Communications: Forthcoming

The effect of Covid certificates on vaccine uptake, health outcomes, and the economy

In the COVID-19 pandemic many countries required COVID certificates, proving vaccination, recovery, or a recent negative test, to access public and private venues. We estimate their effect on vaccine uptake for France, G...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What would it take to level up the UK?

The government's levelling up agenda seeks to reduce disparities across the UK. Policies to boost economic performance will need to attract workers and firms away from London and the South East and improve opportunities ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Social mobility in the time of Covid-19

Young people, especially those from poorer households, have been hard hit by the economic impact of Covid-19. Andrew Eyles assesses the extent of the shock and what it means for social mobility - the extent to which indi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Young people's university plans: evidence from German reunification

Around a decade after Germany's reunification, a long-standing educational gap between the east and west of the country - completion of the certificate needed to enter university - had closed. Ghazala Azmat and Katja Kau...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The economics of levelling up

There is an economic tension at the heart of the government’s plans for 'levelling up' the UK, according to CEP's research director Henry Overman. He argues that getting serious about helping people to access good job op...Read more...

Blog

The Sutton Trust:

Gloomy prospects for social mobility in the pandemic era

Lee Elliot Major and Andrew Eyles explain how a gap in missed education between richer and poorer children was exacerbated by stark home learning divides and the likely consequences for social mobility....Read more...

External publication

Social mobility: past, present and future

Andrew Eyles, Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin forecast that relative income mobility levels in the UK could fall by as much as 12%, driven by learning loss in schools....Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

What we learnt about the Covid economy

In spring 2020, many countries imposed radical, urgent actions including lockdowns to protect their citizens' health - but there was also a need to protect people from the worst of the ensuing economic storm. Academics a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Europp:

Evidence from Greece: the potential pitfalls of using education as a welfare policy instrument

Policymakers frequently use education as a welfare policy instrument. But can these policies have unintended consequences? Christos Genakos and Eleni Kyrkopoulou present findings from a case study in Greece where a socia...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Housing policy and affordable housing

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities around the world. The main underlying cause for the 'affordability crisis', which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of stro...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Recidivism and neighbourhood institutions

Between 30% and 50% of individuals sentenced to prison are re-incarcerated in the two years after their release. Andres Barrios-Fernandez and Jorge Garcia-Hombrados examine links between church openings in Chile and re-i...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Unsafe jobs, labour market risk and social protection

This paper proposes a new classification of occupations based on the extent to which they put workers at risk of being infected by aerial-transmitted viruses. We expand on previous work that mainly focused on the identif...Read more...

Chapter

The backlash of globalization

in Handbook of International Economics

We review the literature on the globalization backlash, seen as the political shift of voters and parties in a protectionist and isolationist direction, with substantive implications on governments' leaning and enacted p...Read more...

External publication

Innovation and inequalities

Innovation can affect inequalities in many ways - increasing some inequalities and decreasing others. An innovation can introduce a new good, improve the quality of existing goods, or lead to new ways of doing things. It...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy :

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The effects of college capital projects on student outcomes

What can the UK government expect to get for its £1.5 billion investment in further education colleges? Claudia Hupkau and Sandra McNally investigate the benefits of capital projects in the sector and find that they help...Read more...

CentrePiece article

What have the 2021 Nobel laureates done for us?

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. Jörn-Steffen Pischke explains how the use of natural experiments in empirical economics, work in which they were pione...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Inequalities in student to degree match

Researchers find students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be undermatched to their degree courses both academically and in terms of earnings potential. Women are more likely than men to be underma...Read more...

External publication

Spatial disparities across labour markets

Spatial inequalities in the UK are profound and persistent. In 2019, average wages in London were 60% higher than those in Scarborough and Grimsby. Employment rates ranged from 66% in Skegness and Louth to 90% in Harroga...Read more...

Journal article

Perspectives on Psychological Science: Forthcoming

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 Covid-19:

Covid has hit social mobility in the UK, and young people's prospects are shrinking

The economic impact of Covid has hit young people, and especially poorer young people, harder than others. Andrew Eyles assesses the extent of the shock and what it means for social mobility, which was already in decline...Read more...

External publication

Social mobility in the time of Covid: assessing the social mobility implications of Covid-19

Covid-19 has had a profound impact on the economic prospects of young people. This briefing note, which forms part of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, documents the unequal impact of economic shocks on the young and assesses wh...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Health Planning and Management: Forthcoming

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

Wirtschaftsdienst:

Natural Experiments in Labor Economics and Beyond: The 2021 Nobel laureates David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens

This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics honoured David Card of the University of California, Berkeley “for his empirical contributions to labour economics”, and Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of Stanford University ...Read more...

Blog

CVER Blog:

The effects of college capital projects on student outcomes

In the 2020 budget the UK government committed 1.5 billion pounds over five years to improve further education colleges. Stephen Gibbons, Claudia Hupkau, Sandra McNally and Henry Overman write that the policy should help...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

The Effects of College Capital Projects on Student Outcome

The general debate on the relationship between school resources and student outcomes is an old and controversial one (for reviews see, for example, Hanushek, 1989, 1997 and Gibbons and McNally, 2013), although there is l...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Sink or swim time? Social mobility and the 2021 Budget

Lee Elliot Major assesses the prospects for social mobility and economic recovery in Rishi Sunak's 2021 Budget....Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Nobel prize in economics recognises evidence-based impact evaluation

following the announcement of the 2021 Nobel prize in economics being awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their contributions to an evidence-based research, Gonzalo Nunez-Chaim explains the continu...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Natural experiments in labour economics and beyond: the 2021 Nobel laureates David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", and to Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happy to help: NHS volunteering in Covid-19 times

The Covid-19 crisis prompted thousands to register as NHS Volunteer Responders, helping vulnerable people with small daily tasks like shopping. Christian Krekel and colleagues find big increases in wellbeing among those ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Learning loss since lockdown

Young people in education have lost significant amounts of time in school during the pandemic - and this carries risks of lifetime scars. Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin reveal the scale of learning los...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Move on up

In the third and final anniversary lecture marking 30 years since CEP began, director Stephen Machin focused on social mobility - the extent to which young people's opportunities in life can transcend their family backgr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Population Economics: Forthcoming

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949-2017

This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian Peop...Read more...

Blog

Higher Education Policy Institute:

Why highly selective universities need to demystify admissions for student applicants

In light of Covid-19's impact on A-level results, Lee Elliot Major and Kieran Tompkins dispel misconceptions around university admissions, such as the number of students drawn from private and state schools at Russell Gr...Read more...

Journal article

Small Business Economics:

Homophily and peer influence in early-stage new venture informal investment

Abstract: Conceptualising early-stage new venture informal investors as co-entrepreneurs whose actions are socially embedded, we examine the role of social influence and how it interplays with entrepreneurial experience ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

A local community course that raises wellbeing and pro-sociality: Evidence from a randomised controlled trial

Despite a wealth of research on its correlates, relatively little is known about how to effectively raise wellbeing in local communities by means of intervention. Can we teach people to live happier lives, cost-effective...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Ethnic minorities and the UK labour market

Contrary to the impression given by the Sewell Report, there has been little change in disparities in pay, employment and unemployment among different ethnic groups in the UK over the past 25 years. Indeed, as analysis o...Read more...

Blog

LSE Review of Books:

Book Review: What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? by Lee Elliott Major and Stephen Machin

In What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? Lee Elliott Major and Stephen Machin give an account of the long experience of social mobility in the UK, its barriers and a possible way out. Offering a st...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Happy to help: how a UK micro-volunteering programme increased people's wellbeing

Levels of wellbeing increased significantly for individuals who participated in the NHS Volunteer Responders (NHSVR) programme, with effects lasting months after the volunteering period had ended, write Paul Dolan, Chris...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happy to help: welfare effects of a nationwide volunteering programme

We study the wellbeing benefits from volunteering in England's National Health Service (NHS) Volunteer Responders programme, which was set up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using combined survey and administrative...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Formation of college plans: expected returns, preferences and adjustment process

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study the determinants of college attendance and the role played by one's environment. We analyze whether, and how quickly, adolescents' college plans are adapted, explore factors le...Read more...

Blog

LSE Research for the World:

Government urban regeneration initiative failed to improve Britain's most deprived areas

In 1994, John Major's Conservative government launched an initiative to improve a range of societal issues through regeneration. The Single Regeneration Budget ran for nearly a decade, but failed to create opportunities ...Read more...

Journal article

The Lancet Public Health :

Policy stringency and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal analysis of data from 15 countries

To date, public health policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic have been evaluated on the basis of their ability to reduce transmission and minimise economic harm. We aimed to assess the association between COV...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Beyond income inequality: factoring in non-monetary rewards

While many researchers, policy makers, and interest groups are concerned with income inequality and its impact on society, much of the debate has focused on inequality in wages. In contrast, relatively little work has ad...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Ethnic minorities and the UK labour market: are things getting better?

Alan Manning and Rebecca Rose compare disparities in pay, employment and unemployment among different ethnic groups in the UK finding that there has been little change over the past 25 years. Indeed, for black, Pakistani...Read more...

Journal article

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin:

Inequality and Social Rank: Income Increases Buy More Life Satisfaction in More Equal Countries

How do income and income inequality combine to influence subjective well-being? We examined the relation between income and life satisfaction in different societies, and found large effects of income inequality within a ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

A year in the UK labour market: what's happened over the coronavirus pandemic?

Jonathan Wadsworth explains how the performance of the UK labour market during Covid-19 shows that the most notable effects of a downturn caused by restrictions on mobility are the more dynamic aspects: falls in hours, h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does growing up in a recession increase compassion? The case of attitudes towards immigration

Macroeconomic conditions during young adulthood have a persistent impact on people's attitudes and preferences. The seminal paper by Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2014) shows that people who grew up in a recession are more l...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...

CEP discussion paper

Unequal learning and labour market losses in the crisis: consequences for social mobility

The unequal learning and labour market losses arising in the UK due to the Covid-19 pandemic are used to assess the consequences for social mobility. Labour market and learning losses have been more pronounced for people...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the externalities of renewable energy plants using wellbeing data: the case of biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The grandkids aren't alright: the intergenerational effects of prenatal pollution exposure

Using newly linked survey and administrative data, providing more than 150 million parent-child links, we show that regulation-induced improvements in early life air quality have intergenerational effects on human capita...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

No inventor is an island: social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Faceb...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Covid-19 and social mobility: the public support key policies that will help limit widening inequalities in employment and education

Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles, and Stephen Machin present new data around public support behind the implementation of job guarantees, the reform of A-level and GCSE exams in 2021, and the abolition of predicted grades f...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happier lives: exploring what matters

Can we teach people to live happier and more pro-social lives? Are there cost-effective and scalable interventions? And could the effects be sustained over time? Christian Krekel and colleagues have evaluated the impact ...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Generation COVID: emerging work and education inequalities

The purpose of this brief paper is to present initial findings from the recently collected LSE-CEP Social Mobility survey, which was undertaken as part of our UKRI project ‘Generation COVID and Social Mobility: Evidence ...Read more...

Blog

LSE American Politics and Policy Blog:

Enslavers dominated Southern politics long after the Civil War ended

Before the Civil War, the politics and economy of the Southern US were dominated by those who practiced immoral - but at the time legally permissible - forced enslavement. In new research, Luna Bellani, Anselm Hager, and...Read more...

Book

What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility?

In this vital new book, Britain's first Professor of Social Mobility Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin, reveal the causes of the UK's low social mobility, explain why it's getting worse, and outline how we reverse this...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parental well-being in times of Covid-19 in Germany

We examine the differential effects of Covid-19 and related restrictions on individuals with dependent children in Germany. We specifically focus on the role of school and day care center closures, which may be regarded ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Center-based care and parenting activities

We estimate the effects of center-based care on parenting activities with children using data from time diaries and a family survey for Germany. Our estimates imply that usage of center-based care reduces the amount of t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Covid-19 and social mobility

Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin propose urgent actions to tackle economic and educational inequalities in Britain...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. W...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: a response to the responses

We are very happy to see the engagement of so many eminent scholars in our field with our modest proposal for how to proceed with wellbeing policy formation in the UK. We are also heartened by the apparent endorsement of...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Covid-19 and social mobility

Governments are having to balance short- and long-term interests, and the trade-offs they generate, as they try to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Social distancing measures may limit the number of immediate deaths f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

O brother, where start thou? Sibling spillovers on college and major choice in four countries

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger s...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Covid-19 is increasing the divide in life chances between rich and poor

Covid-19 is increasing the divide in life chances between rich and poor Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin propose reforms and urgent actions to tackle economic and educational inequalities in the UK....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A local community course that raises mental wellbeing and pro-sociality

Although correlates of mental wellbeing have been extensively studied, relatively little is known about how to effectively raise mental wellbeing in local communities by means of intervention. We conduct a randomised con...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Intergenerational effects of employment protection reforms

Job insecurity has worsened in most OECD countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Labour Force Survey data, I estimate the link between parental job insecurity (as measured by the contract type held by pa...Read more...

CEP election analysis

#GE2019Economists: the research evidence on key issues for voters in the 2019 UK General Election

The general election of 2019 was called after negotiations over how the UK should leave the European Union became increasingly tortuous. While Brexit may have been the trigger for the election, it was far from being the ...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Health and social care

The National Health Service (NHS) is arguably the one national institution that unifies the country in terms of general public support. But there is growing concern about the long-term sustainability of the NHS, with 57%...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Social mobility

Debates over how to improve life prospects for people irrespective of their family background promise to be a key theme in the run-up to the 2019 General Election. This briefing summarises evidence on social mobility fro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. W...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The causes and consequences of early-adult unemployment: Evidence from cohort data

We here use the employment-history data from the British Cohort Study to calculate an individual's total experience of unemployment from the time they left education up to age 30. We show that, conditional on current une...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Socio-economic inequality and academic match among post-compulsory education participants

The study investigates the impact of socioeconomic background on the academic match of students in post-compulsory upper-secondary education making use of detailed individual-level linked administrative data from schools...Read more...

Blog

LSE Review of Books:

Book Review: Social Mobility and its Enemies by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin

In Social Mobility and its Enemies, Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin offer a thought-provoking assessment of the state of social mobility in Britain. In the context of much social and political change and rising level...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Understanding day care enrolment gaps

We document day care enrolment gaps by family background in a country with a universal day care system (Germany). Research demonstrates that children of less educated or foreign-born parents can benefit the most from day...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Healthy minds: the positive impact of a new school curriculum

As the UK government prepares to make personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education compulsory, a recent trial shows how these subjects can be taught successfully. Grace Lordan and Alistair McGuire evaluate the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Widening the high school curriculum to include soft skill training: impacts on health, behaviour, emotional wellbeing and occupational aspirations

From 2020 the health and relationships aspects of Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education will be compulsory in UK schools for adolescents. However less is known about how it can be taught in an effective manner....Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The price ain't right? hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured

We use insurance claims data covering 28% of individuals with employersponsored health insurance in the United States to study the variation in health spending on the privately insured, examine the structure of insurer-h...Read more...

Journal article

Health Affairs:

Hospital prices grew substantially faster than physician prices for hospital-based care in 2007-14

Evidence suggests that growth in providers' prices drives growth in health care spending on the privately insured. However, existing work has not systematically differentiated between the growth rate of hospital prices a...Read more...

Journal article

IZA World of Labor:

Intergenerational income persistence

A strong association between incomes across generations—with children from poor families likely to be poor as adults—is frequently considered an indicator of insufficient equality of opportunity. Studies of such “interge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where is the Land of Hope and Glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For England and Wales, a paucity of data has made this a difficult question to reliably answer. This paper p...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

The bedroom tax

Housing subsidies for low income households are a central pillar of many welfare systems, but an expensive one. This paper investigates the consequences of an unusual policy aimed at reducing the cost of these subsidies ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Subsidizing labor hoarding in recessions: the employment and welfare effects of short time work

The Great Recession has seen a revival of interest in policies encouraging labor hoarding by firms. Short time work (STW) policies, which consist in offering subsidies for hours reductions to workers in firms experiencin...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Housing Economics:

Housing in Europe: A different continent – A continent of differences

This article provides the introduction to the special issue on ‘Housing in Europe: a different continent – a continent of differences’ in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018. Europe is a large continent with a long ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Convenient primary care and emergency hospital utilisation

Participation and utilisation decisions lie at the heart of many public policy questions. I contribute new evidence by using hospital records to examine how access to primary care services affects utilisation of hospital...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Social mobility and its enemies

Increasingly it seems that the rich and poor of Britain are destined to stay on the same rungs of the economic or social ladder for successive generations. A new book by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin calls for an a...Read more...

Book

Social Mobility and its Enemies

Apart from the USA, Britain has the lowest social mobility in the Western world. The lack of movement in who gets where in society - particularly when people are stuck at the bottom and the top - costs the nation dea...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The bedroom tax

The ‘bedroom tax’ – a UK government policy introduced in 2013 that cut housing benefits for social tenants deemed to have a ‘spare’ bedroom – saved some public money, according to research by Steve Gibbons and colleagues...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Diffusion of social values through the lens of US newspapers

Changing attitudes are the result of a battle for hearts and minds in which agents for and against change try to persuade others. We know very little about this process. This paper develops a methodology for measuring se...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The bedroom tax

Housing subsidies for low income households are a central pillar of many welfare systems, but an expensive one. This paper investigates the consequences of an unusual policy aimed at reducing the burden of these subsidie...Read more...

CVER Research Paper

Skills, Signals, and Employability: An Experimental Investigation

As skills of labor-market entrants are usually not directly observed by employers, individuals acquire skill signals. To study which signals are valued by employers, we simultaneously and independently randomize a broad ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Locus of Control and its Intergenerational Implications for Early Childhood Skill Formation

This article builds upon Cunha's (2015) subjective rationality model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on their children's early skill formation. We propose that this subjecti...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Health Economics:

Do you have to win it to fix it?: A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health-care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on the utilization of health-care services, and the choice between private and public health care in the United Kingdom. Our ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Surprise! Out-of-network billing for emergency care in the United States

Using insurance claims data capturing 8.9 million emergency episodes, we show that in 22% of cases, patients attended in-network hospitals, but were treated by out-of-network physicians. We find that out-of-network billi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Politics, hospital behaviour and health care spending

This paper examines the link between legislative politics, hospital behaviour, and health care spending. When trying to pass sweeping legislation, congressional leaders can attract votes by adding targeted provisions tha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The social origins of inventors

In this paper, we merge three datasets - individual income data, patenting data, and IQ data - to analyze the deterninants of an individual’s probability of inventing. We find that: (i) parental income matters even after...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The economic consequences of family policies: lessons from a century of legislation in high-income countries

By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fer...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can raising instructional time crowd out student pro-social behaviour? Unintended consequences of a German high school reform

We study whether raising instructional time can crowd out student pro-social behaviour. To this end, we exploit a large educational reform in Germany that has raised weekly instructional hours for high school students by...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Social Tenants' Health: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Landlord Interventions

Objectives: To test whether a social landlord can improve health outcomes for older tenants and reduce their NHS usage by simple interventions. Design: Randomised controlled trial. Setting: Social housing in five London ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Adjusting Your Dreams? High School Plans and Dropout Behaviour

At the end of middle school, many low-achieving students realise that they do not have the ability to get into selective high school programmes, which may be a source of disengagement and eventually lead them to drop out...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The hospital as a multi-product firm: the effect of hospital competition on value-added indicators of clinical quality

There is increasing international interest in using Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) to assess health care provider performance. PROMs are a fundamental advance on existing indicators of health care quality in t...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The NHS and Social Care: Prospects for Funding, Staffing and Performance into the 2020s

Health featured prominently in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), with the Leave campaign’s claim that Brexit would mean that £350 million extra money per week could be transferred fro...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Take What You Can: Property Rights, Contestability and Conflict

Weak property rights are strongly associated with underdevelopment, low state capacity and civil conflict. In economic models of conflict, outbreaks of violence require a prize that is both valuable and contestable. This...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 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...

CentrePiece article

Superstar houses and the American mortgage frenzy

Clement Bellet shows how visible wealth inequality fuelled the US mortgage boom that preceded the financial crisis....Read more...

Journal article

The World Bank Economic Review:

Volunteerism after the tsunami: The effects of democratization

Using three waves of survey data from fishing villages in Aceh, Indonesia for 2005-09, we examine the determinants of local volunteer labor after the tsunami. Volunteer labor is the village public sector labor force for ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The paradox of the Joneses: superstar houses and mortgage frenzy in suburban America

Despite a major upscaling of suburban houses over the last decades, house satisfaction has remained steady in the United States. I show that upward comparison in size can explain this paradox, as top housing size mirrore...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Diversity and neighbourhood satisfaction

This paper investigates the impact of ethnic diversity on individuals’ overall satisfaction with and other aspects of their neighbourhood. It uses panel data and a variety of empirical methods to control for potential en...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Social mobility in the United States

There is considerable geographical variation in the opportunities available to disadvantaged children in the United States, according to research by Raj Chetty, who delivered the 2016 Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures at ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Stimulative Effect of an Unconditional Block Grant on the Decentralized Provision of Care

Understanding the impact of central government grants on decentralized health care provision is of crucial importance for the design of grant systems, yet empirical evidence on the prevalence of flypaper effects in this ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Social Policy:

Educational inequality, educational expansion and intergenerational mobility

The distribution of education by social background and the mobility prospects of society are intimately connected. To begin to predict future trends in mobility in the UK we bring together evidence on educational inequal...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

Do cash transfers improve birth outcomes? Evidence from matched vital statistics, and program and social security data

There is limited empirical evidence on whether cash transfers to poor pregnant women improve children's birth outcomes and potentially help weaken the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Using a unique array of program a...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Taking Care of the Budget? Practice-level Outcomes during Commissioning Reforms in England

I investigate whether vesting budgets with doctors impacts treatment decisions and patients outcomes by exploiting the transitional phase of major recent health care reforms in England that passed budgets to consortia of...Read more...

Journal article

Research Policy:

Do inventors talk to strangers? on proximity and collaborative knowledge creation

This paper examines the characteristics of the collaborations between inventors in the United Kingdom (UK) by looking at what types of proximities - geographic, organisational, cognitive, social, and cultural-ethnic - be...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Higher education, career opportunities, and intergenerational inequality

The UK government has expressed a desire to increase social mobility, with policies to help achieve this aim focused on reducing inequalities in educational attainment. This paper draws together established and new infor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The price ain't right? Hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured

We use insurance claims data covering 28 percent of individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance in the US to study the variation in health spending on the privately insured, examine the structure of insurer-hosp...Read more...

Submission to a parliamentary inquiry and government consultation

Response to the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility - Call for Evidence on "Transitions from School to Work"

Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Informal care and the great recession

Macroeconomic downturns can have both an important impact on the availability of informal care and the affordability of formal long-term care. This paper investigates how the demand for and provision of informal care cha...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do you have to win it to fix it? A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of h...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economic Value of Local Social Networks

The idea that local social capital yields economic benefits is fundamental to theories of agglomeration, and central to claims about the virtues of cities. However, this claim has not been evaluated using methods that pe...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Walk This Way: Estimating Impacts of Walk in Centres at Hospital Emergency Departments in the English National Health Service

In publicly funded health care systems policy-makers face a dilemma: placing low acuity emergency care services outside hospitals may widen access to care and divert patients from making costly hospital visits, but may a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do women earn less even as social entrepreneurs?

Based upon unique survey data collected using respondent driven sampling methods, we investigate whether there is a gender pay gap among social entrepreneurs in the UK. We find that women as social entrepreneurs earn 29%...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Neighbourhood Turnover and Teenage Attainment

Theories about neighbours’ influence on children based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighb...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Immigrant's access to social housing: perception and reality

Although most UK immigrants are likely to be eligible to apply for social housing, there is no evidence that they have preferential access – if anything the reverse seems to have been the case. But it does seem that ther...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration and the access to social housing in the UK

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the probability of being in social housing in the UK. In recent years immigrant households are slightly more likely than natives to be in social housing but once one c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Upward social mobility, well-being and political preferences: evidence from the BHPS

The paper uses 18 waves of BHPS data to provide evidence of the roles of both own social status and upward mobility relative to one's parents on job and life satisfaction, preferences for redistribution, pro-public secto...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational persistence in income and social class: the impact of within-group inequality

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons’ earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urban Escalators and Inter-regional Elevators: The Difference that Location, Mobility and Sectoral Specialisation make to Occupational Progression

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevato...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Free to choose? The impact of healthcare reform

Has the introduction of greater choice and competition in healthcare in England led to improved outcomes for patients? The authors assess changes in the quality of care that hospitals provided for cardiac surgery patient...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Life Opportunities: The Evidence on the UK’s Declining Social Mobility

Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neighbors, Knowledge, and Nuggets: Two Natural Field Experiments on the Role of Incentives on Energy Conservation

There is increasing research on the exogenous impact of descriptive social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US

This paper analyses how neighbors' income affect agents' well-being using unprecedented data from the BRFSS and the City of Somerville. We conduct a multi-scale approach at the county, ZIP code and street-levels and find...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Moving Up and Sliding Down: An Empirical Assessment of the Effect of Social Mobility on Subjective Wellbeing

Many people remain in the same income group as their parents and this is a cause of much discussion and some concern. In this work, we examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using the B...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Social policies and labor market outcomes in Latin America and the Caribbean: a review of the existing evidence

Latin America and the Caribbean have become in the last decade or so a formidable laboratory for the design and implementation of innovative social policies. In the face of an unprecedented surge in the number of non-con...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Free to Choose? Reform and Demand Response in the English National Health Service

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluat...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Ambition, Human Capital Acquisition and the Metropolitan Escalator

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by Fielding (1989). It argues that occupational p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incentives for Quality over Time - The Case of Facebook Applications

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engag...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Integration on Productivity and Welfare Distortions Under Monopolistic Competition

A fundamental question in monopolistic competition theory is whether the market allocates resources efficiently. This paper generalizes the Spence-Dixit-Stiglitz framework to heterogeneous firms, addressing when the mark...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Cash Transfers Improve Birth Outcomes? Evidence from Matched Vital Statistics, Social Security and Program Data

There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children’s birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statisti...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Bright Side of Social Capital: How 'Bridging' Makes Italian Provinces More Innovative

Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature. Existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on its impact on local innovative performance: some empirical analyses emphasize a positive...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Model for the Delivery of Evidence-Based PSHE (Personal Wellbeing) in Secondary Schools

Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) education is a non-statutory school subject designed to facilitate the delivery of a number of key competencies relevant to health, safety and wellbeing. As well as contributing...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven prim...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

To Join or Not to Join? Factors Influencing Employee Share Plan Membership in a Multinational Corporation

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidize the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The educational background of postgrad students

Has the boom in postgraduate courses in the UK over recent years had a negative impact on intergenerational mobility? Research by Stephen Machin and Richard Murphy suggests that there is a small but significant imbalance...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Measuring the Returns to Lifelong Learning

This paper investigates the returns to lifelong learning, which is interpreted as the attainment of qualifications following entry into the labour market. For a number of reasons our analysis of the British Household Pan...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

New Housing Supply and the Dilution of Social Capital

This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Hospital Competition Save Lives? Evidence from the English NHS Patient Choice Reforms

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Welfare Policy and the Distribution of Hours of Work

We examine the distribution of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities when sectors are divided into three groups: one that produces goods without home substitutes and two oth...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...

CEP discussion paper

Theory of Values

Economists have a well-developed theory of value but the theory of why people hold the values they do is rudimentary at best. In spite of the fact that it is common to argue that values are important, most work on values...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

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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe

This paper examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd’s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employment Outcomes in the Welfare State

We examine the implications of tax and subsidy policies for employment in the 'three worlds of welfare', Anglo-Saxon, Continental European and Scandinavian. We argue that home production is key to a proper evaluation of ...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

The Impact of Early Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills on Later Outcomes

Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Respect

Becker (1974) introduced to modern economics the idea that others care about what others think about them and derived many useful insights from this assumption. But he did not provide a very complete description of the g...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Accounting for intergenerational income persistence: noncognitive skills, ability and education

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Gold Rush Theory of Economic Development

This paper presents a model of social learning about the suitability of local conditions for new business ventures and explores its implications for the microeconomic patterns of economic development. I show that: i) fir...Read more...

Chapter

Changes in intergenerational mobility in Britain

in Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe

What economic regimes offer children born into poor families the best hope of moving into higher income groups? This study analyzes and contrasts the experience of the more free market based North American and British ec...Read more...

Chapter

Mobility and joblessness

in Seeking A Premier Economy: The Economic Effects Of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000

The perceived impact of location on economic opportunity has been a constant refrain in discussions of the economic performance of the United Kingdom for as long as anyone can remember and the source of much feeling th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Friends and Relatives Really Help in Getting a Good Job?

Informal contacts are extensively used by both firms and workers to find jobs and fill vacancies. The common wisdom in the economic literature is that jobs created through this channel are of better quality and pay highe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Costs of Urban Property Crime

This paper estimates the impact of recorded domestic property crime on property prices in the London area. Crimes in the Criminal Damage category have a significant negative impact on prices. Burglaries have no measurabl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changes in intergenerational mobility in Britain

This paper compares and contrasts estimates of the extent of intergenerational income mobility over time in Britain. Estimates based on two British birth cohorts show that mobility appears to have fallen in a cross-cohor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Whence Reform? A Critique of the Stiglitz Perspective

This paper discusses the key hypotheses which Joseph Stiglitz proposed, in his wide-ranging critique of the 'Washington Consensus', with regard to transition reforms and economic polices in China and Russia. The primar...Read more...