Results

CEP discussion paper

Gendered change: 150 years of transformation in US hours

Women's contribution to the economy has been markedly underestimated in predominantly agricultural societies, due to their widespread involvement in unpaid agricultural work. Combining data from the US Census and several...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Urban-biased structural change

Economic activity in high-income countries has shifted towards services and away from manufacturing. But research remains scant on the patterns of structural change within countries across urban and rural areas. Using mi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The geography of structural transformation: effects on inequality and mobility

The interplay between structural transformation in the aggregate and local economies is key to understanding spatial inequality and worker mobility. This paper develops a dynamic overlapping generations model of economic...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Structural change within versus across firms: evidence from the US

One feature of the US economy over the last five decades has been the transition away from manufacturing towards services. This column takes a firm-level view of structural change from 1977-2019 to study these sectoral d...Read more...

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics :

The slope of the Phillips Curve: evidence from US States

We estimate the slope of the Phillips curve in the cross section of U.S. states using newly constructed state-level price indices for nontradeable goods back to 1978. Our estimates indicate that the slope of the Phillips...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Structural change within versus across firms: evidence from the United States

We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' "auxiliary" establishments, we develop a novel ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Trade, structural transformation, and development: evidence from Argentina 1869-1914

We provide new theory and evidence on the role of external and internal integration in structural transformation and economic development, using Argentina's integration into the world economy in the late nineteenth centu...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Quantifying the full impact of country-specific policies on trade flows

Rebecca Freeman, Mario Larch, Angelos Theodorakopoulos and Yoto Yotov propose a solution to issues measuring country-specific impact using structural gravity models - a popular way to analyse the impact of trade policie...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pandemic shock and economic divergence: political economy before and after the black death

We document how the Black Death activated politics and led to economic divergence within Europe. Before the pandemic, economic development was similar in Eastern and Western German cities despite greater political fragme...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Common Market Studies:

The Effect on Foreign Direct Investment of Membership in the European Union

This article explores the impact of EU membership on foreign direct investment (FDI). It analyses empirically how the effects of such deep integration differ from other forms and investigates what drives these effects. U...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Organizing Global Supply Chains: Input-Output Linkages and Vertical Integration

We study how the technological importance of inputs—measured by cost shares—is related to the decision to “make” or “buy” that input. Using detailed French international trade data and an instrumental variable approach b...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Market Potential and Global Growth over the Long Twentieth Century

We examine the evolution of market potential and its role in driving economic growth over the long twentieth century. Theoretically, we exploit a structural gravity model to derive a closed-form solution for a widely-use...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market potential and global growth over the long twentieth century

We examine the evolution of market potential and its role in driving economic growth over the long twentieth century. Theoretically, we exploit a structural gravity model to derive a closed-form solution for a widely-use...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Structural adjustments and international trade: theory and evidence from China

This paper studies how changes in factor endowment, technology, and trade costs jointly determine the structural adjustments, which are defined as changes in distributions of production and exports. We document the struc...Read more...

Journal article

The World Bank Economic Review:

On minimizing the risk of bias in randomized controlled trials in economics

Estimation of empirical relationships is prone to bias. Economists have carefully studied sources of bias in structural and quasi-experimental approaches, but the randomized control trial (RCT) has only begun to receive ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics:

Gender gaps and the rise of the service economy

This paper investigates the role of the rise in services in the narrowing of gender gaps in hours and wages in recent decades. We highlight the between-industry component of differential gender trends for the United Stat...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... How the rise of the service economy narrowed the gender gap

The historical growth in the service sector since the Second World War has created jobs for which women have a comparative advantage, according to analysis by Rachel Ngai and Barbara Petrongolo. Their research shows how ...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Estimating strategic models of international treaty formation

This article develops an empirical framework for analysing the timing of international treaties. A treaty is modelled as a dynamic game among governments that decide on participation in every period. The net benefit of t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

The price of development: The Penn–Balassa–Samuelson effect revisited

The Penn–Balassa–Samuelson effect is the stylized fact about the positive correlation between cross-country price level and per-capita income. This paper provides evidence that the price–income relation is actually non-l...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Impact of Structural Reforms on Regional Growth: Distance to the Frontier Matters

This paper aims to understand the impact of nation-wide structural policies on the productivity growth of OECD regions. In particular we explore how this impact varies with the productivity gap of regions with their coun...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish thi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Oil: the impact on women's work

Stephan Maurer and Andrei Potlogea explore whether oil-dominated economies are naturally biased against women's labour market participation....Read more...

CentrePiece article

The path from cause to effect: mastering 'metrics

How should researchers interested in social and economic policy untangle cause and effect? A new book by Joshua Angrist and Jörn Steffen Pischke shows how the five core econometric tools -randomised trials, regression, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

European integration and the gains from trade

This chapter discusses whether and how .new quantitative trade models.(NQTMs) can be fruitfully applied to quantify the welfare effects of trade liberalization, thus shedding light on the trade-related effects of further...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fueling the gender gap? Oil and women's labor and marriage market outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of resource-based economic specialization on women's labor market outcomes. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields in the Southern United States coupled with a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

External integration, structural transformation and economic development: evidence from Argentina

This paper uses the natural experiment of Argentina’s integration into world markets in the late-nineteenth century to provide evidence on the role of internal geography in shaping the effects of external integration. We...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Outsourcing and the shift from manufacturing to services

Giuseppe Berlingieri looks at the structural transformation of the US economy over the past 60 years....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 discussion paper

Estimating Bayesian decision problems with heterogeneous priors

In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender Gaps and the Rise of the Service Economy

This paper explains the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and market hours in recent decades by the growth of the service economy. We propose a model with three sectors: goods, services and home production. Women have a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Outsourcing and the Rise in Services

This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1948-2002. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity As If Space Mattered: An Application to Factor Markets Across China

Optimal production decisions depend on local market characteristics. This paper develops a model to explain firm labor demand and firm density across regions. Firms vary in their technology to combine imperfectly substit...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...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Homeownerhip and Entrepreneurship

We study the link between homeownership and entrepreneurship by exploiting the longitudinal dimension of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and constructing a detailed monthly-spell dataset that tracks individuals...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

From Grants to Loans and Fees: The Demand for Post-Compulsory Education in England and Wales from 1955 to 2008

The UK has progressively moved from a Higher Education (HE) system which is funded at the tax payers’ expense to one which is funded by individual participants (and their parents) by scrapping student grants, introducing...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Autoregressions in Small Samples, Priors about Observables and Initial Conditions

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modelled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Leveraging Monopoly Power by Degrading Interoperability: Theory and Evidence from Computer Markets

When will a monopolist have incentives to leverage his market power in a primary market to foreclose competition in a complementary market by degrading compatibility/interoperability of his products with those of her riv...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Penn-Belassa-Samuelson Effect in Developing Countries: Price and Income Revisited

It is conventional wisdom that richer countries have a higher price level than poorer countries. This paper provides evidence that the price-income relationship is non-linear and that it turns negative, or at best flat, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design is taking the Con out of Econometrics

This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer’s (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Recovering the Sunk Costs of R&D: the Moulds Industry Case

Sunk costs for R&D are an important determinant of the level of innovation in the economy. In this paper I recover them using a Markov equilibrium framework. The contribution is twofold. First, a model of industry dynami...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the Existence of the Maximum Likelihood Estimates for Poisson Regression

We note that the existence of the maximum likelihood estimates for Poisson regression depends on the data configuration. Because standard software does not check for this problem, the practitioner may be surprised to fin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tax Cuts in Open Economies

A reduction in income tax rates generates substantial dynamic responses within the framework of the standard neoclassical growth model. The short-run revenue loss after an income tax cut is partly - or, depending on para...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wage Distributions by Bargaining Regime: Linked Employer-Employee Data Evidence from Germany

Using linked employer-employee data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey 2001, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of the wage structure in three wage-setting regimes prevalent in the German system of ind...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity Growth, Knowledge Flows and Spillovers

This paper explores the role of knowledge flows and TFP growth by using direct survey data on knowledge flows linked to firm-level TFP growth data. Our knowledge flow data correspond to the kind of information flows ofte...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment and Hours of Work: The North Atlantic Divide Revisited

I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trends in Hours and Economic Growth

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the structural transformation between agriculture, man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Balanced Growth With Structural Change

We study a multi-sector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of a balanced aggregate growth path, with all aggregates growing at the sam...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Zipfs Law for Cities: An Empirical Examination

We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 û 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In...Read more...