Centre for Economic Performance

Highlights

Labour market shocks during the Covid-19 pandemic

Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isphording, Stephen Machin and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela show how cuts in earnings affect the time parents spent with their children, and the money spent supporting learning.
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Trade protection along supply chains

Chad Brown, Paola Conconi, Aksel Erbahar and Lorenzo Trimarchi analyse the effect of antidumping duties - the most widely used trade barriers between the USA and China. Read more...

Pandemic has 'only increased the importance' of agreeing Brexit deal

Josh De Lyon, Swati Dhingra and Edoardo Tolva find that Covid-19 has disrupted businesses' ability to prepare for Brexit, but uncertainty over a no deal Brexit is worse. Read more...

Latest

The Times

Build back wellbeing and you will truly level everyone up

Richard Layard and Gus O’Donnell write about the need for policy makers to aim for the wellbeing of the people, now and to come – focusing more on what matters to people, their mental and physical ... Read more...

27 December 2020

The Times

Happiness has its place in economics again — but what matters more is wellbeing

Philip Aldrick contemplates the importance of wellbeing as economic policy, citing research by Richard Layard and George Ward. ... Read more...

26 December 2020

TES

Youth unemployment: 4 ways to incentivise employers

New incentives need to be introduced to encourage employers to invest in younger workers who have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, the London School of Economics and Political Science has said. ... Read more...

16 December 2020

The Big Issue

It is time for Britain to create its own New Deal

Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin remember the drive behind Roosevelt's New Deal which created millions of jobs during America's Great Depression in the 1930s and examine how government policy could ... Read more...

08 December 2020

The Guardian

What happens if the UK and EU fail to agree a Brexit deal?

A report by the Centre for Economic Performance found that seven in 10 firms “expect a no-deal Brexit to negatively impact their business”, adding that the consequences of no deal are "se... Read more...

07 December 2020

Centre for Economic Performance

This is CEP - 30 years of research

For 30 years, the CEP has studied economic performance at all levels: people, firms, cities, nationally and globally. We ask how the economy works and how it can work better. Find out how our research has alre... Read more...

27 November 2020

Financial Times

Covid crisis threatens UK boom in self-employed work

New research by Jack Blundell, Steven Machin and Maria Ventura finds a fifth of the self-employed workforce expect to leave self-employment as a result of the Covid-19 crisis; and the proportion is h... Read more...

23 November 2020

Financial Times

What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? makes FT best books list

The book What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? has been named as one of the best books on economics this year by the Financial Times. The book by Lee Elliot Major, professor of s... Read more...

17 November 2020

ESRC

Richard Layard presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Economic and Social Research Council

Lord Richard Layard has been presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Economic and Social Research Council for his work in economics which spans more than 50 years. Professor Layard, the CEP... Read more...

12 November 2020

The Guardian

A million people may quit self-employment in Covid-hit UK – study

Survey findings from Jack Blundell, Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura finds the trend of more people working for themselves under threat during the Covid-19 pandemic. A fifth of the self-employed... Read more...

10 November 2020

The Times

Self-employed switching to regular jobs

A survey by Jack Blundell, Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura finds one in five self-employed workers plan to switch to other forms of employment because of Covid-19. ... Read more...

10 November 2020

The Telegraph

Alter A-levels and GCSEs to take into account lost learning, parents demand

New research by Lee Elliot Major finds the majority of parents with school aged children feel that exams should be amended to compensate for learning loss resulting from Covid-19. ... Read more...

06 November 2020

BBC

'Generation Covid' hit hard by the pandemic, research reveals

BBC Panorama reports on CEP research, fiding people aged 16-25 were more than twice as likely as older workers to have lost their job, while six in 10 saw their earnings fall, according to new research. ... Read more...

26 October 2020

The Telegraph

Only six in ten pupils are getting full education despite schools reopening, report finds

During late September and early October, just 59 per cent of pupils benefitted from “full schooling”, says new report. ... Read more...

26 October 2020

TES

Revealed: UTC attainment gap for pre and post-16s

New research finds that while 14-year-olds who enrol at University Technical Colleges (UTCs) get significantly worse GCSE results than their peers, 16-year-olds who enrol at a UTC outperform their peers in sk... Read more...

14 October 2020

The Guardian

Only radical reform can fix Britain's broken ladder of social mobility

Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin argue how political reform is needed to solve issues with social mobility resulting from Covid-19. They explain that the findings of their review of evidence on social mobil... Read more...

07 October 2020

Department for International Trade

CEP associates to join new UK trade panel

Two Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) associates are members of a new expert trade panel set up to support UK trade negotiations. The Department for International Trade (DIT) has said that Professor Ton... Read more...

30 September 2020

The Express

GENERATION COVID: Britain's under-25s will never recover from this

COVID-19 was the great equaliser, it was claimed during the early days of the pandemic. Lee Elliot Major explains that the virus didn't care whether you were rich or poor. We were all in it together. ... Read more...

25 September 2020

British Medical Journal

Taking a wellbeing-years approach to policy choice

Every day, policy makers have to decide whether a policy is desirable by examining its impact on a whole range of outcomes. But the problem is how to aggregate these disparate outcomes. Richard Layard et al&nb... Read more...

24 September 2020

Economics Observatory

Will coronavirus cause a big city exodus?

Big cities thrive because of the economic and social benefits of proximity – but proximity also helps to spread Covid-19. Does this mean an end to the big city revival of recent years? Much will depend o... Read more...

23 September 2020

BNN Bloomberg

The world is losing the money laundering fight

Amidst increasing levels of money laundering, Tom Kirchmaier suggests a three-step solution to the issues faced by banks. ... Read more...

21 September 2020

ISQOLS

Richard Layard wins Distinguished Researcher award

Richard Layard wins the ISQOLS Distinguished Quality-of-Life Professor Lord Richard Layard has been given the 2020 award for his substantial contribution to wellbeing research. ... Read more...

21 September 2020

VoxEU

Importing inequality: immigration and the top 1%

Top incomes have grown rapidly in recent decades and this growth has sparked a debate about rising inequality in Western societies. Felix Koenig et al investigate whether migration can account for the maj... Read more...

17 September 2020

The Economist

Covid-19 has forced a radical shift in working habits

The Economist examines the benefits of working from home in light of lockdown, and cites findings made by Nick Bloom that those who worked from home were more productive. ... Read more...

12 September 2020

TES

'Big concerns’ over Covid catch-up tutors shortage

Lee Elliot Major, who used to head up the Sutton Trust, which is helping to deliver the scheme, said there were now "big concerns" over whether there was sufficient capacity to support... Read more...

09 September 2020

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CEP discussion papers

The impact of regulation on innovation

Does regulation affect the pace and nature of innovation and if so, by how much? We build a tractable and quantifiable endogenous growth model with size-contingent regulations. We apply this to population administrative ... Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud and John Van Reenen

18 January 2021

Blog

New incentives for businesses to train their employees are needed for economic recovery from COVID-19

The need to retrain or upskill the workforce has become ever more urgent due to sharp changes in skills demand induced by the pandemic, write Jiaqi Li, Guglielmo Ventura and Anna Valero.... Read more...

Jiaqi Li, Anna Valero and Guglielmo Ventura

18 January 2021

CEP discussion papers

Why have house prices risen so much more than rents in superstar cities?

In most countries – particularly in supply constrained superstar cities – house prices have risen much more strongly than rents over the last two decades. We provide an explanation that does not rely on falling interest ... Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Andreas Mense

15 January 2021

CEP discussion papers

The impact of non-tariff barriers on trade and welfare

Deep trade agreements are widespread and have taken the world beyond tariff liberalization in goods trade. As the importance of global supply chains and the services sector increased across the world, shallow tariff redu... Read more...

Swati Dhingra, Rebecca Freeman and Hanwei Huang

12 January 2021

CEP discussion papers

Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: The UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000-2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors... Read more...

Josh De Lyon and Joao Paulo Pessoa

11 January 2021

CEP discussion papers

Markups, intangible capital and heterogeneous financial frictions

This paper studies the interaction between financial frictions, intangible investment decisions, and markups at the firm level. In our model, heterogeneous credit constraints distort firms' decisions to invest in cost-re... Read more...

Carlo Altomonte, Domenico Favoino, Monica Morlacco and Tommaso Sonno

08 January 2021

Blog

The impact of Covid-19 on technology adoption

Anna Valero and Professor John Van Reenen examine the evidence on technology adoption through the pandemic and what it means for the UK's future of work and productivity crisis. New evidence offers a basis for guarded te... Read more...

Anna Valero and John Van Reenen

07 January 2021

CEP discussion papers

Trade protection along supply chains

During the last decades, the United States has applied increasingly high trade protection against China. We combine detailed information on US antidumping (AD) duties— the most widely used trade barrier — with US input-o... Read more...

Chad Bown, Paola Conconi, Aksel Erbahar and Lorenzo Trimarchi

06 January 2021

Blog

Closing the gap between vocational and general education: University Technical Colleges in England

England introduced University Technical Colleges - hybrid education institutions which combine general and vocational education - in 2010. This column presents the results from the first evaluation of the causal effect o... Read more...

Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally, Camille Terrier and Guglielmo Ventura

23 December 2020

Blog

What happened when parents lost their jobs during lockdown?

Many parents had to cope with losing their jobs or part of their income at the same time as they were forced to home school. How did this affect their children's learning and their mental health? Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isp... Read more...

Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isphording, Stephen Machin and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

21 December 2020

CEP Covid-19 analyses

Labour market shocks during the Covid-19 pandemic: inequalities and child outcomes

We study the effect of negative labour market shocks borne by parents during the Covid-19 crisis on resource and time investments in children and the channels through which negative labour market shocks experienced by pa... Read more...

Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isphording, Stephen Machin and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela

18 December 2020

CEP Covid-19 analyses

Innovation for a strong and sustainable recovery

In the recovery from Covid-19, innovation and diffusion will be key to addressing several structural challenges facing the UK economy. These include improving the UK’s longstanding poor productivity performance, addressi... Read more...

Ralf Martin, Sam Unsworth, Anna Valero and Dennis Verhoeven

18 December 2020

Blog

Why bike thefts, anti-social behaviour and drug offences have gone up during the pandemic

How has crime evolved in England and Wales during the pandemic? Tom Kirchmaier and Carmen Villa-Llera (Centre for Economic Performance, LSE) look at the effects of lockdown and job loss on the kinds of crimes being commi... Read more...

Tom Kirchmaier and Carmen Villa-Llera

17 December 2020

CEP Covid-19 analyses

Covid-19 and changing crime trends in England and Wales

We document changing crime trends in England and Wales in the context of the current global pandemic. During the first lockdown that span from mid-March to mid-May 2020 there was a decrease in all crime categories except... Read more...

Tom Kirchmaier and Carmen Villa-Llera

17 December 2020

Blog

Why urgent support is needed to address UK skills deficit

New incentives are needed for businesses to train their employees for a post-Covid world, writes Guglielmo Ventura.... Read more...

Guglielmo Ventura

16 December 2020

CEP discussion papers

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

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

Christian Krekel, Julia Rechlitz, Johannes Rode and Alexander Zerrahn

16 December 2020

CVER Research Papers

Trends in job-related training and policies for building future skills into the recovery

The trends outlined in this paper and the broader evidence suggest that new or enhanced policies to increase the quantity and quality of job-related training are required, particularly for younger workers or those with l... Read more...

Jiaqi Li, Anna Valero and Guglielmo Ventura

16 December 2020

CEP discussion papers

The UK's great demand and supply recession

We revisit UK’s poor productivity performance since the Great Recession by means of both a suitable theoretical framework and firm-level prices and quantities data for detailed products allowing us to both measure demand... Read more...

Nick Jacob and Giordano Mion

15 December 2020

Blog

Lockdown shows us it is not work that attracts us to big cities - but the social life

Covid-19's effect on the social lives of city dwellers - being able to meet at the pub, restaurants or theatre - may be more relevant for the future of cities than its impact on work, write Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald,... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel

11 December 2020

CEP discussion papers

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel

10 December 2020

CEP discussion papers

Are bigger banks better? Firm-level evidence from Germany

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in post-war Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after... Read more...

Kilian Huber

09 December 2020

CEP discussion papers

All aboard: the effects of port development

This paper examines the effects of port development on the economy. By using scarce local land intensively, ports put pressure on local land prices and crowd out other forms of economic activity. We use the introduction ... Read more...

César Ducruet, Réka Juhász, Dávid Krisztián Nagy and Claudia Steinwender

08 December 2020

Blog

COVID-19 has disrupted businesses' ability to prepare for Brexit, but the lack of clarity on the UK-EU relationship is worse

Almost half of businesses report that COVID-19 has negatively affected their ability to prepare for Brexit. More than half listed uncertainty on the future arrangements between the UK and EU as a limitation on their abil... Read more...

Josh De Lyon, Swati Dhingra and Edoardo Tolva

07 December 2020

CEP discussion papers

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

Evidence shows that environmental quality shapes human capital at birth with long-run effects on health and welfare. Do these effects, in turn, affect the economic opportunities of future generations? Using newly linked ... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer and John Voorheis

02 December 2020

Blog

The Centre for Economic Performance marks 30 years of world-class research

LSE's Centre for Economic Performance, one of Europe's leading economic research centres, is marking its 30th anniversary in 2020/21. A new video, released to mark the Centre's 30th anniversary, highlights the breadth of... Read more...

Helen Ward

01 December 2020

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CEP International Economics Workshops

tbc

Tillman Hoenig (LSE)

03 February 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

What Drives Wellbeing in Schools and of Students?

Jose Marquez Merino (Cambridge)

04 February 2021

CEP Public Events

Going for growth

How can the UK and the world get back to sustainable growth following the COVID-19 pandemic?... Read more...

John Van Reenen (LSE and CEP)

08 February 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

The Long-Term Impact of School Privatization on Wellbeing: Evidence from the 1981 Reform in Chile

Martín Fernández-Sánchez (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research)

11 February 2021

CEP Policing and Crime Workshop

Inequality in US Criminal Justice and Economic Outcomes

Mike Mueller-Smith (Michigan)

17 February 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

Using Memories to Assess the Intrapersonal Comparability of Wellbeing Reports

Caspar Kaiser (Oxford)

18 February 2021

CEP Labour Markets Workshop

Banning the Boston Mechanism in Britain: Effects on School Segregation and Student Achievement

Camille Terrier (HEC Lausanne and CEP)

23 February 2021

CEP Policing and Crime Workshop

Disguising Prejudice: Popular Rationales as Excuses for Intolerant Expression

Christopher Roth (Warwick)

24 February 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

Does Inequality Affect the Perception of Needs?

Clément Bellet (Erasmus and CEP)

25 February 2021

CEP Labour Markets Workshop

School Types – Evidence on the Relative Effectiveness of Different School Arrangements

Olmo Silva (LSE, SERC and CEP)

02 March 2021

CEP International Economics Workshops

tbc

Josh De Lyon (Oxford and CEP)

03 March 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

Does Growing up in a Recession Increase Compassion? The Case of Attitudes Towards Immigration

Maria Cotofan (CEP and LSE)

04 March 2021

CEP Labour Markets Workshop

Minimum wages and the wage policy of firms

Giulia Giupponi (Bocconi University and CEP)

09 March 2021

CEP Policing and Crime Workshop

tbc

Amanda Agan (Rutgers)

10 March 2021

CEP International Economics Workshops

tbc

Fadi Hassan (Bank of Italy and CEP)

10 March 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

The Welfare Effects of Social Media

Sarah Eichmeyer (LMU Munich)

11 March 2021

CEP Labour Markets Workshop

Labour Market Shocks during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Inequalities and Child Outcomes

Claudia Hupkau (CEP)

16 March 2021

CEP International Economics Workshops

tbc

Rebecca Freeman (Bank of England and CEP)

17 March 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

Let’s Face It: Assessing the Welfare Effects of Calorie Labelling Using Facial Expressions

Kate Laffan (University College Dublin )

18 March 2021

CEP Labour Markets Workshop

tbc

Stephen Machin (CEP and LSE)

23 March 2021

CEP International Economics Workshops

tbc

Thomas Sampson (LSE and CEP)

24 March 2021

CEP Policing and Crime Workshop

Corruption under Austerity

We study how policies limiting the spending capacity of local governments may reduce corruption. We exploit the extension of one such policy, the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), to small Italian municipalities. The DSP le... Read more...

Gianmarco Daniele (University of Milan)

24 March 2021