Results

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational income persistence in the Millennial generation

This paper provides new evidence on intergenerational income persistence for a recent UK cohort. Using Next Steps, a longitudinal study of people born in England in 1989-90 linked to administrative education records, we ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Andy Burnham's biggest challenge isn't Britain's old class system - it's the new one

Britain's new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is more "Evertonian" than "Etonian", notes Lee Elliot Major: with his working class roots and political identity rooted in North West England, he marks a radical break with the...Read more...

Blog

Bloomberg Trumponomics (podcast):

Are We Being Priced Out of Happiness?

Americans are spending less time with friends, nights out are getting more expensive and even major sporting events are becoming harder to afford. Stephanie Flanders speaks with Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman and econo...Read more...

CentrePiece article

My must-read paper

Discover Swati Dhingra?s recommended reading on trade economics...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Returns to green tasks in Europe: evidence from online job vacancies

There is growing evidence that green jobs have higher skill requirements, but whether they offer sufficient wage incentives to encourage workers to acquire those skills remains unclear. We study the green wage premium an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The civil war reduced slave owners' economic power but increased their political influence

Did Southern elites? economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave owning and two Northern states (1850?1880), we docume...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gender equality and innovation: evidence from UK companies

We investigate the effect of intra-firm gender disparities on innovation using a unique longitudinal dataset of UK companies from 1996 to 2019. Utilising within-industry and within-firm variation, as well as an instrumen...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...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Workplace presenteeism, job substitutability, and gender inequality

This paper explores how the parenthood wage penalty is partially explained by an increased within-couple gap in job uniqueness (i.e., the within-establishment substitutability of workers). Uniqueness is rewarded with hig...Read more...

Journal article

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers:

Finding stars: mapping the geography of the world's scientific elites

This paper presents the first systematic city-level mapping of global scientific talent, analysing the top 200,000 star scientists across 3635 cities worldwide annually between 2019 and 2023. We use a novel Knowledge Gen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When do employers share? Rent sharing, monopsony and minimum wages

When firm productivity or product demand rises, workers typically share in the gains through higher wages or expanded employment. We show that for firms under monopsony with a binding minimum wage, this link from firm ga...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Putting a value on safety

What the pandemic reveals about the risks that people are willing to take at work....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 Economic Journal:

Non-compete agreements, wages and efficiency: theory and evidence from Brazilian football

The Pele Act banned non-compete agreements in Brazilian football in 1998. We explore this policy change to study how non-competes affect the labour market. The Act changed the wage profile heterogeneously, reducing young...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...

Journal article

Journal of Development Economics:

The firm-pay gender gap and formal sector churn over the life cycle

We find that women sorting into lower paying firms explains nearly half of the gender pay gap in South Africa. Using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal workers, we show sorting varies co...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Pipeline vs. choice: the global gender gap in STEM applications

Women account for only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. We use administrative microdata from centralized university admissions in ten systems to deliver the first cross-national decomposition...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...

CEP discussion paper

Mobile internet connectivity and household wealth in the Philippines

Mobile internet has become a fundamental component of modern infrastructure. In this paper, we consider the impact of mobile internet connectivity on household wealth in the Philippines. We construct a granular measure o...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

People value workplace safety more than traditionally believed

Some workplaces are inherently more dangerous than others, but during the pandemic almost all workplaces became risky. Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig investigated whether workers during COVID chose to forgo earnings to ...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...

Blog

Nature:

We need to predict the people disasters will hit, not just the places

Local authorities can deal with natural hazards more effectively if they know ahead of time who will be affected, writes Jonathan Colmer....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Willingness to pay for workplace amenities

We develop a revealed preference approach to measure the value of workplace amenities by analyzing how variation in non-wage job attributes affects excess mass in the earnings distribution at budget discontinuities. The ...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Bridging barriers: how Covid-19 changed racial diversity in economics seminars

In this paper, new facts are documented on the racial distribution of seminar speakers in economics. From a sample of 270 institutions, I determined that before the Covid-19 pandemic, 82.5% of seminars were given by Whit...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

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...

CEP discussion paper

Trade with nominal rigidities: understanding the unemployment and welfare effects of the China shock

We present a dynamic quantitative trade and migration model that incorporates downward nominal wage rigidities and show how this framework can generate changes in unemployment and labor participation that match those unc...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Income, wealth, and environmental inequality in the US

Economic disparities have long been suspected to be a root cause of environmental inequality. But is this really the case? This column links data on income and wealth with data on air pollution exposure over 40 years to ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The price of power: Why rising markups hurt innovation and widen inequality

Over the past four decades, the US has seen rising market power, slowing productivity growth, and deepening wealth inequality. This column explores how declining competition may be the common culprit. Weak competition le...Read more...

Journal article

German Economic Review:

The immobile incumbent problem in a model of short-term wage-posting

This paper takes the canonical Burdett-Mortensen model of wage-posting and relaxes the assumption that wages are set once-for-all, instead assuming they can only be committed one period at a time. It derives a closed-for...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor market effects of global supply chain disruptions

We examine the labor market consequences of global supply chain disruptions. Specifically, we consider a temporary increase in international trade costs similar to the one observed during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyz...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

De-tracking at the margin: How alternative secondary education pathways affect student attainment

This paper estimates how marginal increases in the flexibility of between-school tracking affect student attainment by exploiting the addition of non-selective `comprehensive schools? and hybrid `vocational high schools?...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Does the child penalty strike twice?

This paper compares the labor market trajectories of grandparents before and after the arrival of their first grandchild. We find gender gaps in earnings of 4 and 10 percent five and ten years, respectively, after the fi...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...

Journal article

Journal of Monetary Economics:

Labor market effects of global supply chain disruptions

We examine the labor market consequences of global supply chain disruptions. Specifically, we consider a temporary increase in international trade costs similar to the one observed during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyz...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Ethnic minority and migrant pay gaps over the life-cycle

It is well-known that ethnic minority and migrant workers have lower average pay than the White UK-born workforce. However, we know much less about how these gaps vary over the life-cycle because of data limitations. We ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Income, wealth and environmental inequality in the United States

This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, and wealth by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979-2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic informatio...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Reservation wages and the wage flexibility puzzle

Using micro data for the UK and Germany, we provide novel evidence on the cyclical properties of reservation wages and estimate that wages and reservation wages are characterised by moderate and very similar degrees of c...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The unequal health effects of smart tech in the workplace

How does technological progress affect workers' health? Melanie Arntz, Sebastian Findeisen, Stephan Maurer and Oliver Schlenker explore the effects of digitalisation and find evidence of worsening health among manual wor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Capital-skill complementarity in firms and in the aggregate economy

We study capital-skill complementarity in a multi-sector framework featuring firm-specific, multi-factor production functions. We characterize the elasticity of the skill premium to the price of capital equipment in term...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Closing the health gap: How chronic illness drives health inequality early on

Though health disparities have long been the subject of research and debate, life expectancy gaps between rich and poor remain striking, even in countries with universal access to healthcare. This column analyses the roo...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Literature:

Temporary employment in markets with frictions

Temporary employment has spiked in OECD countries over the last 40 years and is now a common feature of their labor market landscape. A large body of empirical literature examines the spread of temporary employment, but ...Read more...

Chapter

Happiness and spatial inequality: past, present, and future

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

Why are people happier in certain places as opposed to others? Understanding why people choose to live in a certain area, the elements they take into account when making this decision, and the value that they place on ea...Read more...

Chapter

Money and happiness

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

Many people believe that earning more money would bring more happiness into their lives. However, despite massive improvements in material living conditions in most Western countries, average population happiness has sta...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:

Firms and inequality

We review the existing literature on falling business dynamism and present a new analysis using comprehensive UK firm-level panel data. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a large increase in UK firm-level inequality (es...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...

Journal article

Encyclopaedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing:

Money and happiness

Many people believe that earning more money would bring more happiness into their lives. However, despite massive improvements in material living conditions in most Western countries, average population happiness has sta...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The effect of productivity growth on within-firm inequality

Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the US since the 1970s, largely driven by within-firm earnings inequality. This column uses combined data from three large micro datasets to study the drivers and implication...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The wage of temporary agency workers

Using French administrative data, we estimate the wage gap distribution between in-house and temporary agency workers working in the same establishment and the same occupation. The average wage gap is about 3%, but the g...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Work, wages and inactivity

The recent aggregate performance of the UK labour market looks good. But aggregate performance often obscures important changes around averages. Inequality along several dimensions remains a persistent feature of the UK ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The national minimum wage: 25 years on

It is now just over a quarter of a century since a national minimum wage was introduced in the UK. Once a source of controversy due to fears that it would lead to fewer jobs, the policy has instead proved to be highly su...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Land use regulation, homeownership and wealth inequality

We examine the role that housing market regulatory restrictiveness plays in differentially affecting the net wealth of owners and renters over time, and its contribution to wealth inequality. In tightly regulated desirab...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Where does money matter more?

There is much still to learn about the relationship between income and well-being, and in particular how this may depend on the economic and social context. We use Russian data to estimate individual Welfare Functions of...Read more...

External report

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

The Conversation:

How the national living wage helps the UK's poorest households: new research

The UK's national living wage has just been raised by 10% to #11.44 per hour. It is now payable for all workers aged 21 and over, where previously it was for those aged 23 and over. Introduced in 2016 as the flagship pol...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The national minimum wage - 25 years on

This month marks 25 years since a national minimum wage was introduced in the UK. Once a controversial policy, due to fears that it would lead to fewer jobs, it has instead proven to be highly successful. The minimum wag...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Measuring absolute income mobility: lessons from North America and Europe

We use linked parent-child administrative data for five countries in North America and Europe, as well as detailed survey data for two more, to investigate methodological challenges in the estimation of absolute income m...Read more...

Chapter

Inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems

in Entrepreneurial ecosystems in cities and regions: emergence, evolution, and future

Cities and regions with the strongest entrepreneurial ecosystems are often marked by high levels of inequality. These inequalities have, however, often been overlooked in policy and academic circles. Seeking to remedy th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are we yet sick of new technologies? The unequal health effects of digitalization

This study quantifies the relationship between workplace digitalization, i.e., the increasing use of frontier technologies, and workers' health outcomes using novel and representative German linked employer-employee data...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...

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...

External report

The state of the UK economy 2024

The state of the UK economy is always an important matter, but it is all the more so in what looks likely to be an election year. This UK in a Changing Europe report takes stock of the UK economy in order to assess how i...Read more...

Blog

Notes from Poland:

Six myths about inequality in Poland

Pawel Bukowski discusses and debunks some of the common misconceptions regarding inequality in Poland....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Global managers, local workers: wage setting inside a multinational firm

How are wages set within a multinational firm? Combining cross-country data on wages and labor regulations with personnel records of a large multinational firm, I find that wage setting depends on the rank of the employe...Read more...

Chapter

Income inequality before, during, and after the transition in central and eastern Europe

in The Oxford Handbook of Post-Socialist Economies

This chapter explores the income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after the transition. It argues that the fall of communism and the transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe were landm...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Remote talks: changes to economics seminars during Covid-19

This paper analyzes the consequences of the change in the presentation mode of economics seminars triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The composition of seminar speakers changed significantly. The share of seminars held ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The changing nature of pollution, income and environmental inequality in the United States

This paper uses administrative tax records linked to Census demographic data and high-resolution measures of fine small particulate (PM2.5) exposure to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap over t...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Why household income doesn't tell the full story on individual wellbeing

The literature on inequality often focuses on household income, but this measure has several limitations for assessing individual wellbeing. Tim Obermeier develops a new collective household model which simultaneously ac...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Income inequality in the 21st century Poland

This paper combines micro-level tax data, household surveys and national accounts data to provide consistent series of income distribution in Poland over the 2000-2018 period. We find that inequalities in Poland are one ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual welfare analysis: a tale of consumption, time use and preference heterogeneity

How accurately does household income reflect the well-being of the individuals living within the household? Looking at household income does not take unequal consumption sharing within families, the value of time use (le...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The distributional effects of trade: theory and evidence from the United States

How much do consumption patterns matter for the impact of international trade on inequality? In neoclassical trade models, the effects of trade shocks on consumers' purchasing power are governed by the shares of imports ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

New evidence on spatial wage inequality across North America and Western Europe

Spatial inequality has become a key policy concern across much of the advanced world, prompting a spate of government action on the issue in recent years. This column presents evidence showing that, contrary to the popul...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The evolution of work from home

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20?64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the bi...Read more...

Journal article

Annual Review of Economics:

Labor market insurance policies in the Twenty-First Century

The COVID-19 crisis was a stress test for unemployment insurance schemes as it involved a sudden and unexpected shutdown of a very large set of activities. This forced countries to introduce, often from scratch, income s...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Left-behind versus unequal places: interpersonal inequality, economic decline and the rise of populism in the USA and Europe

Economic change over the past 20 years has rendered many individuals and territories vulnerable, leading to greater interpersonal and interterritorial inequality. This rising inequality is seen as a root cause of populis...Read more...

Blog

IFS Zooms In:

Are differences between companies driving inequality and holding back growth? (podcast)

What do we mean when we talk about inequality between firms? Are inequalities between firms limiting UK business dynamism? And do governments need to step in and enforce competition rules? In this podcast episode, John V...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial wage inequality in North America and Western Europe: changes between and within local labour markets 1975-2019

The rise of economic inequalities in advanced economies has been often linked with the growth of spatial inequalities within countries, yet there is limited comparative research that studies the relationship between nati...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...

CEP discussion paper

The dynamics of the 'Great Gatsby Curve' and a look at the curve during the Great Gatsby era

We use linked historical US censuses to study the empirical relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. We first confirm that the 'Great Gatsby Curve' already existed in the early 20th century. We the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The shift to remote work lessens wage-growth pressure

The recent shift to remote work raised the amenity value of employment. As compensation adjusts to share the amenity-value gains with employers, wage-growth pressures moderate. We find empirical support for this mechanis...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Econometrics:

Union membership density and wages: the role of worker, firm, and job-title heterogeneity

We examine the association between union density and wages in Portugal where just 10 percent of all workers are union members but nine-tenths of them are covered by collective agreements. Using a unique dataset on worker...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Responsible sourcing? Theory and evidence from Costa Rica

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) increasingly impose "Responsible Sourcing" (RS) standards on their suppliers worldwide, including requirements on worker compensation, benefits and working conditions. Are these policies ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Robot adoption, worker-firm sorting and wage inequality: evidence from administrative panel data

Leveraging the geographic dimension of a large administrative panel on employer-employee contracts, we study the impact of robot adoption on wage inequality through changes in worker-firm assortativity. Using recently de...Read more...

Government consultation

Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee - UK plc 2050 (non-inquiry session)

The session examines what policies could restore competitiveness and address the country's intractable productivity and regional inequality problems while also reaching net zero....Read more...

Journal article

Regional Studies:

Level best? The levelling up agenda and UK regional inequality

'Levelling up' - a policy agenda focused on reducing regional inequalities - has become the new mantra in British politics. This paper critiques the policy programme from its emergence in 2019 to the publication of the 2...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Pay inequality is high in South Africa: bosses are part of the problem

South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This income inequality is mostly due to high unemployment and large differences in wages. In South Africa today, economists and policy-makers typically foc...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth :

The well-being cost of inflation inequalities

In terms of well-being, how costly is inflation? To answer this question, empirical evaluations have typically studied average inflation rates at the national level, thus disregarding the role of inflation inequalities w...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...

Journal article

Quantitative Economics:

Income dynamics in the United Kingdom and the impact of the Covid-19 recession

In this paper, we use an employer-based survey of earnings and hours to set out the key patterns in UK earnings dynamics from 1975 to 2020, with a particular focus on the most recent recession. We demonstrate that (log) ...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

The gendered division of paid and domestic work under lockdown

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the division of labour between parents of school-aged children in two-parent opposite-gender families. In line with existing evidenc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who's got the power? Wage determination and its resilience in the Great Recession

Whereas wage inequality has risen markedly in most OECD countries in recent decades, it has fallen in several Southern European economies. To shed light on this phenomenon, we embed sectoral bargaining, which is common i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The wage elasticity of recruitment

One of the factors affecting the market power of employers is the extent to which higher wages makes recruitment easier. There is very little research on this. This paper presents a methodology for estimating the wage el...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...

CEP discussion paper

Labor market insurance policies in the XXI century

The recovery from the Covid-19 crisis will force governments to accelerate transformation in their menu of labor market policy tools. The crisis was a stress test for unemployment insurance schemes as it involved a sudde...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firms and inequality when unemployment is high

How important are firms for wage inequality in developing countries where structural unemployment is high? Research focused on contexts close to full employment has suggested a substantial role of firms in labor market i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The well-being cost of inflation inequalities

In terms of well-being, how costly is inflation? To answer this question, empirical evaluations have typically studied average inflation rates at the national level, thus disregarding the role of inflation inequalities w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Company wage policy in a low-wage labor market

We study how firms set wages for their employees when they can legally age discriminate across workers. We exploit an age-specific minimum wage change in the UK, which raised the minimum applying to workers aged 25 and o...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources :

Workplace presenteeism, job substitutability and gender inequality

This paper explores how the parenthood wage penalty is partially explained by an increased within-couple gap in job uniqueness (i.e., the within-establishment substitutability of workers). Uniqueness is rewarded with hig...Read more...