Results

CEP discussion paper

Employer market power: models and methods

It is now widely recognized that employers hold some wage-setting power over workers, and several recent reviews cover the resulting surge of research on monopsony. We take a high-level view, introducing the idea of the ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

UK national productivity trends: getting the data right

We compare standard productivity estimates of UK output per worker derived from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) with newly released estimates based on more reliable "Real Time Information" (RTI) administrative data. LFS-ba...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Post-Brexit trade policy hit supply chains and workers

After Brexit, firms in the UK found their supply chains disrupted. Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain and Martina Magli show that subsequent declines in trade led to less employment and lower pay for workers - with firms im...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Take-away findings from food delivery apps

Do delivery apps reduce or enhance the attraction of cities?...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Remembering our friend and colleague David Metcalf

A widely-admired economist whose work on labour markets led to a number of high-profile roles in public life...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Why waste segregation policies fail ? and how training makes them work

Reducing landfill use cuts greenhouse gas emissions and costs less...Read more...

Chapter

Advancing gender equality in parenting: the remaining challenge

in The Routledge International Handbook of Time Use Themes and Applications

The roles of men and women in the labour market have been converging in recent decades, but studies have shown that women are devoting more time to childcare, widening the gender gap in this area. Using data from the UK ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Property Investment and Finance:

Real estate insights: sweetening the dog's breakfast that is British property taxes

Purpose - This study aims to stimulate debate on the long overdue strategic reform of property taxes. Design/methodology/approach - This study adopts an approach combining a systematic literature review with economic ana...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

The US-China trade war creates jobs (elsewhere)

We examine the indirect effects of the 2018-2019 US-China trade war on Brazil?s labor market. We construct a measure of regional exposure to the trade conflict using industry-specific tariff changes and the sectoral empl...Read more...

Blog

Transform work:

Transform work with Raffaella Sadun, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (podcast)

Raffaella's work sits at the intersection of economics, leadership, and the future of work. Drawing on large-scale data and real-world field experiments inside major companies, she explores how hybrid work is reshaping l...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of price ceiling regulation: evidence from the retail gasoline market

We examine the short-run impact of price ceilings on retail gasoline prices in isolated oligopolistic markets, uniquely observing for which stations the regulation was binding and for which it was not. Leveraging daily p...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Why don't we have nicer buildings?

The benefits of distinctive urban architecture extend far beyond the buildings themselves, but the costs are borne by the developers. This can lead to underinvestment in high-quality design - and it raises the question o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Green gains from connectivity: highway expansion and forest quality

Roads are often linked to deforestation in frontier settings, but their effects in managed forests are less well understood. We investigate the intensive-margin response of forest outcomes to roads using China?s 2000?201...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Everything you thought you knew about local markets is wrong

In retail markets, competition among firms happens "locally". But what is the right way to define the local geographic market? Using a natural experiment involving petrol stations on Greek islands and in Athens, Christos...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Internal pay equity and the quantity-quality trade-off in hiring

Firms face significant constraints in their ability to differentiate pay by worker productivity. We show how these internal equity constraints generate a quantity-quality trade-off in hiring: firms which offer higher wag...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parenthood and the career ladder: evidence from academia

Persistent gender gaps in the labor market are largely driven by the underrepresentation of women at the top of most professions. We study how parenthood shapes gender gaps in academic careers using population-wide admin...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

A new model of parental time investments: a paradigm shift for addressing gender inequality in the labour market

This paper introduces a new framework for understanding the persistence of the motherhood penalty by emphasizing the role of on-call care. Using a pseudo-panel event study based on the 2003?22 American Time Use Survey (A...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Geographical thinking

Making the industrial strategy work in Manchester...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exchange-rate pass-through and invoicing currency choice in international production networks

We study exchange-rate pass-through and currency choice in international transactions, focusing on bilateral bargaining power in relationships between domestic buyers and foreign suppliers. Using detailed transaction-lev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unpacking the restaurant experience: how food delivery technology favors the affluent urban core

We study how technological innovation has transformed the valuation of consumption services, using the sudden national expansion of food delivery services (FDS) in China as a natural experiment. Using a Bartik-style inst...Read more...

Blog

VoxDev:

Why waste segregation policies fail - and how training makes them work

Citizen training that builds households' practical capability to segregate waste can deliver large, persistent and socially amplified improvements in waste management, making it a highly cost-effective climate policy in ...Read more...

Blog

ADR UK:

Understanding labour markets through administrative data: A workshop of collaborating minds

This blog is by ADR UK Research Fellow Guglielmo Ventura, who reflects on a recent workshop hosted at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. The event brought together leading academic and policy voices to explore how ...Read more...

Journal article

SERIEs:

Paternity leave in Spain

Between 2017 and 2021, Spain progressively extended paternity leave from 2 to 16 weeks, equalizing it with maternity leave and introducing mandatory weeks. A 2018 reform also allowed fathers to split their leave. Using a...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

Free to improve? The impact of free school attendance in England

We evaluate the impact of attending two secondary free schools in England - new autonomous state-funded start-ups - using admission lotteries and a distance-based regression discontinuity design. We characterise each sch...Read more...

Government consultation

Lords' Justice and Home Affairs Committee

Alan Manning gave evidence to the Lords' Justice and Home Affairs Committee....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Great Recession affected millennial education and careers

In 2025 the proportion of young British people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training was at its highest since 2014. How much impact do educational choices made at that age have on future careers...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Allocating land for housing in Tanzania

The economics of greenfield urban planning...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Skills in the age of AI

A focus on wellbeing at work can help employees thrive....Read more...

Chapter

Labour markets and gender inequality

in The London Consensus

Wide disparities persist in the wages and economic power of men and women in nearly all countries. Women still make different educational decisions to men, are under-represented in high-paying jobs, and suffer the majori...Read more...

Journal article

The Energy Journal:

Natural gas vehicles: consequences for fuel markets and the environment

Policies to adopt cleaner fuels have become increasingly important, but their impacts on incumbent fuel prices and resulting greenhouse gas emissions remain unclear. We use a panel dataset on weekly prices at the gas sta...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Recurring labour market shocks and stated and revealed preferences for redistribution

Evidence on the relationship between employment shocks and preferences for redistribution is mixed - on stated outcomes - and sparse - on revealed ones. In an incentivized survey of US workers, we measure the relationshi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A new model of parental time investments: a paradigm shift for addressing gender inequality in the labor market

This paper introduces a new framework for understanding the persistence of the motherhood penalty by emphasizing the role of on-call care. Using a pseudo-panel event study based on the 2003-2022 American Time Use Survey ...Read more...

Chapter

Immigration, diversity and innovation in cities and regions

in A Research Agenda for Migration and Innovation

This chapter investigates the interplay between immigrant diversity and innovation, emphasizing the urban and regional dimensions where these effects are most pronounced. Cities and urban areas are pivotal to the generat...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Monopsony and employer misoptimization explain why wages bunch at round numbers

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks o...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The economics of spatial mobility: theory and evidence using smartphone data

We develop a tractable quantitative framework for modelling the rich patterns of spatial mobility observed in smartphone data. We show that travel is frequently undertaken as part of a travel itinerary, defined as a jour...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU Talk (podcast):

Gender and the labour market

How much progress have we made in finding out the source of gender inequality at work? At the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford and CEPR gave the keynote lecture on 'Questions and...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

Banning NDAs in universities is only the first step toward a better research culture

The UK government is moving to ban non-disclosure agreements being used to silence employees who have suffered harassment or discrimination. Such a ban has already come into place in higher education, economists Dina Rab...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Monopsony and the wage effects of migration

If labour markets are competitive, migration can only affect native wages via marginal products. But under imperfect competition, migration may also increase wage mark-downs ? if firms have greater monopsony power over m...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Background matters, but not whether parents are immigrants: outcomes of children born in Denmark

In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnin...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating labour market power: the long and short of it

This paper combines two empirical traditions in the study of employer monopsony power. One tradition estimates static firm labour supply elasticities, while the other focuses on labour market flows, estimating separation...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Public sector performance disclosure: salary and career outcomes for top managers and employees

Public sector organizations around the world are held to account on the basis of objective measures of performance. This paper investigates, for the first time, the impact of subjective school inspection ratings on labor...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Fully remote work expands recruitment and boosts productivity

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked a large and lasting shift to remote work. This column draws on detailed administrative data from a major call centre in Turkiye to show that a permanent shift to fully remote work can expand...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Working from home boosted growth by expanding disability employment

Individuals with a disability have remarkably low employment rates compared to the rest of the population. This column examines whether the rapid rise in the ability to work from home post-pandemic has improved disabilit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economics of greenfield urban planning

Urban planning has shaped cities for millennia, demarcating property rights and mitigating coordination failures, but its rigidities often conflict with market-driven development, which reflects preferences. Although pla...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The US-China trade war creates jobs (elsewhere)

We examine the indirect effects of the US-China trade war on Brazil's labor market. Using industry-specific tariff changes and the sectoral employment distribution across local labor markets, we construct a measure of re...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Why are women paid less than men? New research in South Africa shows the company you work for makes the biggest difference

Why do women earn less than men? The usual suspects - occupation, hours, experience - explain some of it. But a powerful, often overlooked reason is simply this: where women work. The companies that hire them play a huge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Minimum wages and low wage workers: compliance as non-employment margin

This paper examines the impact of a substantial minimum wage increase in Uruguay - a middle-income developing economy - on wages and employment. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences approach, we anal...Read more...

Blog

Bank Underground:

Forbearance lending as a crisis management tool

The Bank of England Agenda for Research (BEAR) sets the key areas for new research at the Bank over the coming years. This post is an example of issues considered under the Prudential Architecture Theme which focuses on ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Living wages and government contracts

Living wages are an increasingly common policy tool for reducing poverty and improving the living standards of low-income workers. But until recently, there has been little evidence on how living wage clauses effect the ...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Geography:

Don?t shoot the pianist: creative firms, workers, and neighbourhood gentrification

We examine links between creative activity and gentrification at the neighbourhood level. These dynamics are both complex and important to understand. Artists may help `upgrade? inexpensive neighbourhoods before being di...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating transport improvements in spatial equilibrium

The recent development of quantitative urban models provides a new set of tools for evaluating transport improvements. Conventional cost-benefit analyses are typically undertaken in partial equilibrium. In contrast, quan...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

How to make Labour's National Wealth Fund work

Labour's plans for growth include the creation of a National Wealth Fund. A closer look at the proposals reveals that this is not like other Sovereign Wealth Funds, but is in fact more like a Green Investment Bank, meant...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Microsimulation:

Social distress and (some) relief: estimating the impact of pandemic job loss on poverty in South Africa

Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial for estimating poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but many developing countries lack such data. We ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The evolution of gender in the labour market

Despite significant progress in closing the gender gap in earnings, work remains highly gendered, with women continuing to participate less in the workforce, work fewer hours, and face persistent wage disparities. This c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The evolution of gender in the labor market

This paper traces the evolution of the study of gender in the labor market, focusing on how academic thinking on this topic has evolved alongside real world developments in gender inequality from the 1980s to the present...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

A practical guide to shift-share instruments

A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Firm and worker responses to extensions in paid maternity leave

This paper investigates how firms and workers respond to a voluntary government-funded program increasing the duration of paid maternity leave from four to six months in Brazil. We show that larger, higher-paying, and mo...Read more...

Chapter

New technologies and evolving market structures

in Handbook on Labour Markets in Transition

This Chapter investigates the relationship between technological changes, labour market frictions, and firms' labour market power. We provide guidance through the main trends that characterised labour markets during the ...Read more...

Chapter

The green transition: understanding and managing impacts for workers

in Handbook on Labour Markets in Transition: Promoting Resilience in a World in Flux.

The transition to net zero will have far-reaching and unequal effects on labour markets, as some jobs disappear, existing jobs change, and new jobs aligned with or supportive of the net-zero objective are created. The ev...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Achieving net zero by 2050 requires changes to the UK skills landscape

As COP29 brings climate action into focus, it's clear that policy must go beyond carbon trading and finance. To make net zero a reality, the workforce must be equipped with the right skills. Aadya Bahl examines what this...Read more...

Journal article

PloS ONE:

Agglomeration costs limit sustainable innovation in cities in developing economies

Theory and evidence from developed economies suggests that innovation activities benefit from agglomeration economies associated with urban economic density. However, despite the fact that eighteen of the world?s top twe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantitative urban economics

This paper reviews recent quantitative urban models. These models are sufficiently rich to capture observed features of the data, such as many asymmetric locations and a rich geography of the transport network. Yet these...Read more...

Government consultation

Scottish parliament: Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee

Christian Hilber gives evidence to the Housing inquiry....Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

New dawn fades: Trade, labour and the Brexit exchange rate depreciation

This paper studies consequences of the large exchange rate depreciation occurring when the UK electorate unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union. Sterling plummeted, recording the biggest one-day depreciation of a...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

US electoral impact of remote work and inter-state migration

Remote work and geographic mobility have surged in the US since 2020. This column examines trends for both and discusses the potential electoral implications. The authors find that remote work opportunities are dispropor...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Voluntary carbon markets are helpful but far from perfect

Voluntary carbon markets are an important tool in the fight against climate change, but several issues make them less effective. Carbon offsets often overstate emissions reductions, and firms use these as a cheaper alter...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Better work: whose business is it?

Regulating the labour market is essential to address the inherent imbalance of power between employers and employees. But that doesn?t necessarily mean that the state needs to intervene more than it already does. Alan Ma...Read more...

Journal article

World Development:

Institutional transition: Social cohesion and demand for land titles in urban Tanzania

In much of urban Africa, demand for statutory property rights remains low even when governments coordinate land titling programmes and reduce the costs of registration. This paper studies the Residential Licence programm...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Education makes women, not men, more likely to have children

Given the wide-ranging consequences of declining fertility rates, academics and policymakers around the world are increasingly interested in understanding what influences men's and women's decision to start a family. Han...Read more...

Blog

Centre for cities:

City Talks: Why we are seeing a boom in urban economics research (Podcast)

We are constantly finding out more about where people live and work, how people move around, where businesses choose to locate, and where people spend their money - all of which adds more depth to our picture of cities. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Valuing consumption services as technology transforms accessibility: Evidence from Beijing

Home delivery reduced the value of cities as locations to access variety in durable consumption goods. Food delivery services (FDS) are doing the same for restaurants. Home-streaming of sports or home-delivered restauran...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Regional Science:

Within-city roads and urban growth

In this paper we study the role of within-city roads layout in fostering city growth. Within-city roads networks have not been studied extensively in economics although they are essential to facilitate human interactions...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Labour's planning reforms - how to make housing targets work

Labour promised serious reforms to the planning system while in opposition. What it has proposed now that it's in Government, including reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework, is very far from a fundamental re...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Labour's planning reforms - building on grey belts and missed opportunities

Perhaps the proposal that people are most aware of when it comes to Labour's planning reform plans, the one that hit the headlines, is the idea of potentially re-defining small areas of green belts as "grey belt land". T...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When trade drives markup divergence: an application to auto markets

When firms sell in multiple markets, estimates of markups from the demand-side will generally diverge from estimates based on the supply-side (e.g. via production functions). The empirical examination of the importance o...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Open Economics:

Spatial disparities across labour markets

We consider disparities across local labour markets in Great Britain. Disparities in wages and employment rates are large and persistent, although smaller than 20 years ago. These disparities largely reflect the concentr...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...

Blog

Vox EU:

Gendered change: 150 years of transformation in US hours

The 2023 Nobel Committee awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin. Among her many contributions is the emphasis on the non-monotonic trend in women's employment...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Identifying agglomeration shadows: long-run evidence from ancient ports

We examine "agglomeration shadows" that emerge around large cities, which discourage some economic activities in nearby areas. Identifying agglomeration shadows is complicated, however, by endogenous city formation and "...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Putting quantitative models to the test: an application to Trump's trade war

The primary motivation behind quantitative modeling in international trade and many other fields is to shed light on the economic consequences of policy changes. To help assess and potentially strengthen the credibility ...Read more...

Blog

Politics and Policy:

Smarter, not more regulation will lead to better work

A long tradition in economics says that if an employer and a worker agree a contract on any terms both parties must be made better-off or otherwise they would not have agreed to the contract in the first place. If that w...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The linear algebra of economic geography models

We provide sufficient statistics for nominal and real wage exposure to productivity shocks in a constant elasticity economic geography model. These exposure measures summarize the first-order general equilibrium elastici...Read more...

Journal article

Town Planning Review:

Pushing water uphill: containment policies doomed to fail

London has had a green belt for seventy years making it the `canary in the coal mine? for `zero land take?. Because of strong demand for housing space, rising prosperity underlies rising urban land demand so rigid physic...Read more...

External report

Labour Economics: Thinking through Labour's economic agenda

With the Labour Party having vowed to achieve the fastest growth in the G7, the Social Market Foundation has brought together leading economic experts to provide independent analysis of the party's proposed approach - an...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Do wages underestimate the inequality in workers' rewards? The joint distribution of job quality and wages across occupations

Information on both wages and job quality is needed in order to understand the occupational dispersion of wellbeing. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large UK sample to construct a measure of `overall reward?, the su...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why representation matters in the economics profession

What prompts someone to become an economist? How important is representation in inspiring the next generation of black economists? And how positive should women economists be about the future? Felicia Odamtten, an econom...Read more...

Journal article

LSE Public Policy Review:

Spatial labour market inequality and social protection in the UK

Spatial inequality in economic outcomes is increasingly seen as a problem for national economies. This paper considers spatial inequality in the UK labour market, its causes, and potential policy solutions. Relative to o...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Gender gaps from labour market downturns

How quickly do men and women find work after mass lay-offs due to workplace closures? Research by Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen reveals that women face a greater risk of unemployment than men and lose a larger share...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Claudia Goldin: the economics of women and the labour market

The study of gender was far from mainstream in economics when Claudia Goldin began her research on women and work in the 1980s. Barbara Petrongolo discusses the impact of the 2023 economics Nobel laureate in shaping toda...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

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy :

Local retail prices, product variety, and neighborhood change

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-ba...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Psychology:

Working memory and fluid intelligence are differentially related to categories of urban fabric in older adults: Results from the Berlin aging study

Urbanization is Globally increasing at a rapid rate but its consequences for mental health, including cognitive functioning, are not well understood. In particular, little is known about the effects of different morpholo...Read more...

Journal article

Explorations in Economic History:

The impact of public transportation and commuting on urban labor markets: evidence from the New Survey of London Life and Labour, 1929?1932

The growth of public transport networks in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had profound effects on commuting in the industrialized world, yet the consequences for labor markets during this important per...Read more...

Book

Innovation for the Masses
How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy

From San Francisco to Shanghai, many of the world's most innovative places are highly unequal, with the benefits going to a small few. Rather than simply asking how we can create more high-tech cities and nations, Innova...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

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

Parenthood and academic career trajectories

Women continue to be underrepresented in the field of economics, especially among permanent faculty. As parenthood is an important driver of gender inequality in the labor market, we study the impact of children on the a...Read more...

Journal article

Urban Studies:

Unbundling tenure security and demand for property rights: evidence from urban Tanzania

Rapid urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa occurs with little land registration, and government-led regularisation schemes often find limited uptake of title deeds by residents. In theory, there could be private and public...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 skyscraper revolution: global economic development and land savings

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Adapting or compounding? The effects of recurring labour shocks on stated and revealed preferences for redistribution

The evidence on the impact of employment shocks on preferences for redistribution is mixed on stated outcomes and sparse on revealed ones. We conduct a survey of US workers to measure the impact of repeated labour market...Read more...