Results

CEP discussion paper

Mind the break-up: when policy disrupts firms' supply chains

This paper examines how policy-induced supply-chain shocks affect firms? performances, using the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) as a source of exogenous variation. Using UK microdata on firm-level goods and ...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

Italian Economic Journal:

Artificial intelligence in education: computer-assisted learning and AI-guided tutors

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) offer powerful tools to improve foundational skills and close educational gaps, with evidence showing meaningful gains in student performance, especially ...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

Meaning at work

We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "D...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Why the social care visa had to go

One of the changes to the UK work migration regime announced in this week's White Paper was that care workers could no longer be hired directly from abroad. To some this return to the pre-2021 system was an act of econom...Read more...

Blog

The We Society:

Improving social mobility through education and language with Lee Elliot Major (podcast)

Professor Lee Elliot Major joins Will Hutton to discuss the decline of social mobility in the UK and advocates for a broader understanding of systemic barriers, including arguing for a new approach towards language to im...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

The Review of Economic Studies:

Revisiting event study designs: robust and efficient estimation

We develop a framework for difference-in-differences designs with staggered treatment adoption and heterogeneous causal effects. We show that conventional regression-based estimators fail to provide unbiased estimates of...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact of Social Sciences:

What makes the child penalty in academia different?

Women are underrepresented in senior academic positions in economics. Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen assess the impact of having children on men and women's career trajectories and suggest how the sector can adapt....Read more...

Journal article

Demography:

Population growth, immigration, and labor market dynamics

This article provides a first synthesis of population flows and labor market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations. We devise a novel dynamic accounting methodology that integrates population flows from t...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...

CEP discussion paper

Paternity leave and child development

We study the effect of paternity leave on early child development. We collect survey data on 5,000 children under age six in Spain and exploit several extensions of paternity leave that took place between 2017 and 2021. ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unsettled: job insecurity reduces home-ownership

We evaluate the link between job insecurity and one of the most-important decisions that individuals take: homeownership. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax on firms that laid off older workers produced an unexpec...Read more...

Chapter

Women's representation and the gender pay gap: rank, institutional research intensity and ethnicity in UK business schools

in Research Handbook on Inequalities and Work

We employ a multi-faceted framework to explore the importance of women's representation to the gender pay gap (GPG) in all UK business schools to analyse an authoritative and complete administrative sample from the Highe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do wind turbines have adverse health impacts

While wind power is considered key in the transition towards net zero, there are concerns about adverse health impacts on nearby residents. Based on precise geographical coordinates, we link a representative longitudinal...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Adolescent development and the math gender gap

This paper investigates the determinants of the gap between girls and boys in mathematics performance (the 'math gap'). We are particularly interested in the role played by pubertal development in explaining the widening...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

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 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...

CEP discussion paper

Collective bargaining and spillovers in local labor markets

How does collective bargaining affect the broader wage structure? How are such spillovers transmitted? I present a model where firms with wage-setting power that are not covered by collective bargaining agreements, but a...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics of the Household :

Marriage as insurance: job protection and job insecurity in France

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it. We here consider marriage as a way of insuring against labour-market risk. The 199...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Human Computer Studies:

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to assess current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to access current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Population Economics:

In medio stat victus: labor demand effects of an increase in the retirement age

After falling for four decades, statutory retirement ages are increasing in most OECD countries. The labor market adjustment to these reforms has not yet been thoroughly investigated by the literature. We draw on a major...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

A natural experiment on job insecurity and fertility in France

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. A 1999 rise in the French layoff tax paid by large private firms when they laid off older workers made younger workers less secure; this ins...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Population growth, immigration and labour market dynamics

This paper examines the role of population flows on labour market dynamics across immigrant and native-born populations in the United Kingdom. Population flows are large, and cyclical, driven first by the maturation of b...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Service offshoring and export experience

Trade in services is important but difficult to measure. This column introduces a new dataset that helps understand the contribution of services to global value chains and their role in the process of exporting goods. Fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Marriage as insurance: job protection and job insecurity in France

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it. We here consider marriage as a way of insuring against labour-market risk. The 199...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Recovering from the first Covid-19 lockdown: Economic impacts of the UK's Eat Out to Help Out scheme

We evaluate some of the economic impacts of the UK's Eat Out to Help Out (EOTHO) scheme on the food service sector. EOTHO subsidised the cost of eating out, with a 50% discount Mondays to Wednesdays in August 2020. We ex...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Face-to-face communication in organisations

Communication is integral to organizations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce. We argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Better together? Heterogeneous effects of tracking on student achievement

I study the effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement, exploiting institutional differences between German federal states. In all states, about 40% of students transition to separate academi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing global production: theory and evidence from just-in-time supply chains

Global value chains are highly fragmented across countries and dominated by a few large multinational firms. But the challenges of an increasingly difficult international business environment are raising the question of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A natural experiment on job insecurity and fertility in France

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. We here argue that it reduces fertility amongst the employed. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by large private firms when th...Read more...

CentrePiece article

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

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

CEP occasional paper

Clusters in UK self-employment

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

CEP discussion paper

Spillover effects from new housing supply

I estimate spillovers from new housing supply on house prices, crime rates, and household income. To estimate these effects, I use exogenous variation in supply induced by a housing subsidy implemented in middle-income n...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Ease vs. noise: long-run changes in the value of transport (dis)amenities

For a complete cost-benefit analysis of durable infrastructures, it is important to understand how the value of non-market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long-run. We ...Read more...

Journal article

China and World Economy:

Fiscal subsidy policy on home appliances: its effects on domestic consumption and exports in China

This paper evaluates the effects of the Home Appliances Going to the Countryside (HAGC) policy, a fiscal subsidy program implemented in China to boost private consumption of home appliances in rural areas from 2007 to 20...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Trade and deskilling: how the post-referendum sterling depreciation hurt workers

The unexpected result of the Brexit referendum, working through the rapid depreciation of sterling, had a sizable negative impact on UK workers. New CEP work by Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin shows that the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Ease versus noise: long-run changes in the value of transport (dis)amenities

For a complete cost-benefit analysis of durable infrastructures, it is important to understand how the value of non-market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long-run. We ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

The interconnections between services and goods trade at the firm-level

In this paper we study how international trade in goods and services interact at the firm level. Using a rich dataset on Belgian firms for the period 1995?2005, we show that: i) firms are much more likely to source servi...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

The regional effects of Germany's national minimum wage

We show that the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015 led to spatial wage convergence, in particular in the left tail of the distribution, without reducing relative employment in low-wage regions within the first t...Read more...

Journal article

CESifo Economic Studies:

Weights to address non-parallel trends in panel difference-in-differences models

Causal inference using the difference-in-differences (DD) method relies on the untestable assumption of parallel counterfactual trends across units that are assigned to different treatments. To facilitate the application...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The interconnections between services and goods trade at the firm-level

In this paper we study how international trade in goods and services interact at the firm level. Using a rich dataset on Belgian firms during the period 1995-2005, we show that: i) firms are much more likely to source se...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tenure in office and public procurement

We study the impact of politicians' tenure in office on the outcomes of public procurement. To this purpose, we match a data set on the politics of Italian municipal governments to a data set on the procurement auctions ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Traffic Externalities and Housing Prices: Evidence from the London Congestion Charge

This study exploits the introduction of the London Congestion Charge (CC) that greatly improves traffic conditions in Central London to provide new evidence on the capitalization of traffic externalities onto housing val...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Bargain hunters: calculating the benefits of consumer search

To what extent can shoppers convert the time they spend looking for particular products into monetary savings? The authors use electronic tags to study the behaviour of 12,000 consumers in a large supermarket in Northern...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

Consumer search: evidence from path-tracking data

We estimate the effect of consumer search on the price of the purchased product in a physical store environment. We implement the analysis using a unique data set obtained from radio frequency identification tags, which ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Because I'm worth it: a lab-field experiment on the spillover effects of incentives in health

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task ? and then how...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Game of Zones: The Economics of Conservation Areas

Provided there are positive external benefits attached to the historic character of buildings, owners of properties in designated conservation areas benefit from a reduction in uncertainty regarding the future of their a...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Urban Wage Growth Premium: Sorting or Learning?

This paper is concerned with the urban wage premium and addresses two central issues about which the field has not yet reached a consensus. First, the extent to which sorting of high ability individuals into urban areas ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Service Trade and Occupational Tasks: An Empirical Investigation

Using micro data for Belgium we investigate the relationship between occupational tasks changes and the rise of service trade. We focus the analysis on the extensive margin and look at the heterogeneous proliferation of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Change and Persistence in the German Model of Collective Bargaining and Worker Representation

This paper depicts and examines the decline in collective bargaining coverage in Germany. Using repeat cross-section and longitudinal data from the IAB Establishment Panel, we show the overwhelming importance of behavior...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual Voice in Employment Relationships: A Comparison Under Different Forms of Workplace Representation

This article considers the role of individual employee voice in regulating the `zone of acceptance? within the employment relationship, and examines the extent to which different models of collective voice inhibit or fos...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Role of Worker Flows in the Dynamics and Distribution of UK Unemployment

Unemployment varies substantially over time and across subgroups of the labour market. Worker flows among labour market states act as key determinants of this variation. We examine how the structure of unemployment acros...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managers' Mobility, Trade Status and Wages

This paper investigates whether the arrival of managers with export experience, i.e. experience acquired through participation in the export activity of previous employers, is related to firms' international trade status...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Higher Wages Come at a Price?

Using linked employer-employee data for Britain we find job satisfaction and job anxiety are negatively correlated but higher wages are associated with higher job satisfaction and higher job anxiety. However, we observe ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Individual Voice in Employment Relationships: A Comparison Under Different Collective Voice Regimes

This article examines the relationship between individual and collective employee voice, and management-led voice (appraisal), under contrasted collective voice regimes. In the first, collective workplace voice depends o...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Minimum Wages and Schooling: Evidence from the UK's Introduction of a National Minimum Wage

This paper uses the introduction of the national minimum wage in the UK in April 1999 as a `natural experiment? to analyse the impact of minimum wages on enrolment in schooling. At the time of its introduction, only work...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Slip Sliding Away: Further Union Decline in Germany and Britain

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Extent of Collective Bargaining and Workplace Representation: Transitions between States and their Determinants. A Comparative Analysis of Germany and Great Britain

Industrial relations are in flux in many nations, perhaps most notably in Germany and Britain. That said, comparatively little is known in any detail of the changing pattern of the institutions of collective bargaining a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trading Places: Employers, Unions and the Manufacture of Voice

Using nationally representative workplace data for Britain we show that over the last quarter century union voice ? especially union-only voice ? has been associated with poorer climate, more industrial action, poorer fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

U.S. Labor Market Dynamics Revisited

The picture of U.S. labor market dynamics is opaque. Empirical studies have yielded contradictory findings and debates have emerged regarding their implications. This paper aims at clarifying the picture, which is import...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor Search and Matching in Macroeconomics

The labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis. This paper provides a critical, selective survey of the literature. Four fundamental questions are explored: how are unemployment, job v...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Gross Worker Flows in the Presence of Informal Labor Markets. The Mexican Experience 1987-2002

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representative developing country with a large unregulated of ?informal? sector, Mexico. It finds, first, that the formal salaried sector show...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What Voice Do British Workers Want?

The problems/need for representation and participation reported by workers vary across workplaces and by types of jobs. Workers with greater workplace needs are more desirous of unions but their preferences are fine-grai...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Labor Market Institutions, Wages and Investment

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relative...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Timeliness, Trade and Agglomeration

An important element of the cost of distance is time taken in delivering final and intermediate goods. We argue that time costs are qualitatively different from direct monetary costs such as freight charges. The differen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unemployment in Britain: A European Success Story

Unemployment in Britain has fallen from high European-style levels to US levels. I argue that the key reasons are first the reform of monetary policy, in 1993 with the adoption of inflation targeting and in 1997 with the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Jobs, Workers and Changes in Earnings Dispersion

The 'fractal' nature of the rise in earnings dispersion is one of its key features and remains a puzzle. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on the causes of changes in earnings dispersion, focusing on the role o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tenures that Shook the World: Worker Turnover in Russia, Poland and Britain

We study worker turnover in a transition economy to investigate to what extent the length of time a worker has been employed by a firm shapes the turnover process. Using data from the Polish Labour Force Survey and The R...Read more...