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New research finds that Brexit caused a sharp trade drop, especially for small firms, cutting UK exports by 6.4% and imports by 3.1%.
How the UK's 2016 National Living Wage influenced the labour market.
An event to highlight the importance of economics in understanding the challenges women face.
Lee Elliot Major writes about the need for new financial arrangements for universities to uphold the principle that a university education should be accessible to all. ... Read more...
21 January 2025
John Van Reenen has spent his professional lifetime probing the weak spots of the UK economy. Now he is based in an office next to Reeves's at the Treasury, with his three fellow advisers. One Labour source says they str... Read more...
17 January 2025
Congratulations to Almudena Sevilla, professor of economics and public policy in LSE’s Department of Social Policy, and associate of the Centre for Economic Performance who has been recognised in the New Year's Hon... Read more...
06 January 2025
Research from the Centre for Economic Performance, a think tank based at the London School of Economics, said Brexit led to a 6.4 per cent drop in the UK's global exports. ... Read more...
18 December 2024
Brexit has hit UK trade less than many forecasters predicted thanks to larger companies adapting to red tape at the border, according to research by the London School of Economics. Researchers estimated UK worldwide good... Read more...
The damage from Brexit to trade links with the EU cost the UK £27bn in the first two years, but the overall impact was more limited than forecasters first estimated, according to the most comprehensive review of th... Read more...
Henry Overman OBE, professor of economic geography at LSE and CEP research director, has been appointed to the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council, it was announced today. Professor Overman is one of 16 members of the ... Read more...
17 December 2024
The Port Talbot steel works is closing its last remaining blast furnace, delivering a shattering blow to the economy and society of a South Wales town where employment and wages were once so strong it became known as Tre... Read more...
15 September 2024
Congratulations to Daniel Chandler who has been awarded the 2024 Voltaire Lecture Medal for his work on how to create a fair society. Chandler, research director of the LSE’s Programme on Cohesive Capitalism and a... Read more...
12 September 2024
Stephen Machin, professor of economics at LSE and CEP director, has been appointed to the newly-created Labour Market Advisory Board, it was announced today. Professor Machin is one of eight board members appointed by w... Read more...
10 September 2024
The 'shock' caused by restrictions introduced during the pandemic in 2020 could take 'seven years to erode', warn Stephen Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Piero Montebruno. ... Read more...
06 September 2024
The average rate of school absences not caused by Covid-19 self-isolation doubled after the pandemic, research by Stephen Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Piero Montebruno has found. ... Read more...
Spending extra cash on mental health services would boost economic growth and improve the nation’s wellbeing more than building new roads, according to an academic analysis from the London School of Economics. Rich... Read more...
03 September 2024
Forcing workers to retire later would free up funding for policing and mental health services and "reduce misery" in Britain, a report co-authored by Richard Layard and published by the London School of Economics has sai... Read more...
Academics have an opportunity to exert more influence in policymaking with demand for robust evidence on the rise, according to Richard Layard, co-author of a report that seeks a "radical change in the government's spend... Read more...
Spending money on mental health support teams in schools saves more money than it costs within two years, researchers from the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance have said. Lord Layard, who led t... Read more...
Richard Layard writes that Labour must apply the wellbeing-to-cost test to every departmental proposal in the spending review. ... Read more...
A well-trained workforce is essential to the economy, but a shortage of alternatives to university means Britain's young people are falling behind. Lord Richard Layard talks about a fundamental injustice in Britain's edu... Read more...
20 August 2024
Ucas is reforming personal statements from next year. Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said he believed the reform was a "significant step in making the university admissions ... Read more...
18 July 2024
John Van Reenen, an innovation expert and former Downing Street policy adviser under Tony Blair’s New Labour government, will head the body, which is expected to sit within the heart of the Treasury. Sources close ... Read more...
11 July 2024
From ending zero-hours contracts to boosting benefits, Britain's new government wants to shift power back to staff. Stephen Machin, Alan Manning and Jonathan Wadsworth explain how the power balance stands now. ... Read more...
07 July 2024
Congratulations to Henry Overman, Professor of Economic Geography and Research Director of the Centre for Economic Performance, who has been recognised in the King's Birthday Honours List 2024. Professor Overman has bee... Read more...
17 June 2024
Daniel Chandler writes that to address the vast inequalities in the United States, a fundamental rethink of economic institutions and the values that guide them is needed. ... Read more...
14 May 2024
Lee Elliot Major outlines how the learning loss suffered by pupils during Covid-19 and the resulting decline in social mobility could be the most enduring legacy of the pandemic, explaining why policies that help level t... Read more...
24 April 2024
Lee Elliot Major's research predicts a steady decline in GCSE results of key subjects until 2030, attributing it to the failure to address the academic and social legacies of school closures during the pandemic. ... Read more...
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Last week we held the first in our latest series of breakfast briefing webinars. This event focused on how local governments can prepare themselves to make the most of the devolution of local growth policy. Our remaining... Read more...
Will Brett-Harding
13 February 2025
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...
Cassandra Chong and Neil Lee
12 February 2025
In recent decades, the United States has experienced a notable rise in markups, a slowdown in productivity growth, and an increase in wealth inequality. We present a framework that unifies these trends into a common driv... Read more...
Giammario Impullitti and Pontus Rendahl
People hate wasting time commuting. But translating that into a monetary value to help government policy isn't that straightforward. Christian Krekel, George MacKerron and Iven Stead present a new method to put a value o... Read more...
Christian Krekel, George MacKerron and Iven Stead
07 February 2025
Richard Layard is a British Labour Economist, a member of the House of Lords, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report. Layard highlights the role of life satisfaction and wellbeing in government policy, and the impo... Read more...
Richard Layard
06 February 2025
This report investigates the UK's 2016 National Living Wage (NLW) introduction, focusing on firm adjustment through labour market transitions and job contract amendments. The NLW boosted worker wages, and whilst there wa... Read more...
Pinjas Albagli, Rui Costa and Stephen Machin
04 February 2025
In recent years, the majority of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have involved illicitly-produced opioids (primarily heroin and fentanyl), overtaking prescription opioids as the main driver of the opioid epidemic. In th... Read more...
J. Travis Donahoe and Adam Soliman
From Oxbridge to Harvard and Yale, elite universities are a feature of many education systems. Andres Barrios Fernandez, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman write about the importance of the social circles created by ... Read more...
Andrés Barrios Fernández, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman
Quantifying technology adoption, spillovers, and diffusion across firms is crucial for understanding industry dynamics, and in turn countries' growth. This column combines firm-level input-output VAT data from Turkey wit... Read more...
Nuriye Melisa Bilgin, Ester Faia and Gianmarco Ottaviano
31 January 2025
We investigate the phenomenon of home bias in scientific citations, where researchers disproportionately cite work from their own country. We develop a benchmark for expected citations based on the relative size of count... Read more...
Pierre Azoulay, Shumin Qiu and Claudia Steinwender
30 January 2025
Differences in consumption patterns between lower- and higher-income households suggest the potential for inflation inequality, but evidence on the scale and drivers of this disparity remains scarce. This column uses 'di... Read more...
Xavier Jaravel
We study the impact of borrower protection on mortgage and housing demand using variation in the likelihood that houses are repossessed coming from heterogeneity in preferences of local judges. We develop a framework tha... Read more...
Piero Montebruno, Olmo Silva and Nikodem Szumilo
29 January 2025
Recent firm-level studies find R&D tax incentives to be much more effective at stimulating firms' R&D investment than what aggregate analyses indicate. Based on a distributed analysis of official R&D survey and administr... Read more...
Silvia Appelt, Matej Bajgar, Chiara Criscuolo and Fernando Galindo-Rueda
People suffering from common mental disorders (CMD) such as depression and anxiety are more likely to be economically inactive. Psychological therapies are highly effective at treating CMDs but less is known about their ... Read more...
Kaludia Rzepnicka, Emma Sharland, Marta Rossa, Ted Dolby, Ekaterina Oparina, Rob Saunders, Daniel Ayoubkhani and Vahe Nifilyan
28 January 2025
This paper documents that out-migration promotes the diffusion of innovation from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. Between 1870 and 1940, nearly four million British immigrants settled in ... Read more...
Davide M. Coluccia and Gaia Dossi
27 January 2025
Concentration (the share of a market's output produced by its largest firms) is a key proxy for measuring market competition. This column introduces a cross-country dataset to measure concentration at the industry level ... Read more...
Sara Calligaris, Chiara Criscuolo, Josh De Lyon, Andrea Greppi and Oliviero Pallanch
26 January 2025
Electric vehicles are increasingly being adopted in Great Britain and other parts of the world, driven by the perception that they offer a cost-effective alternative to internal combustion engine vehicles while reducing ... Read more...
Robert J.R. Elliott, Viet Nguyen-Tien, Eric Strobl and Chengyu Zhang
24 January 2025
Just before the Christmas holidays, the government published their eagerly awaited white paper on English Devolution. The resulting English Devolution Bill will usher in the biggest reorganisation of local government for... Read more...
22 January 2025
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...
Claudia Olivetti, Jessica Pan and Barbara Petrongolo
20 January 2025
We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective a... Read more...
Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. How effective have the trade sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022 been? Politically, they were comprehensive and quick. But anecdotal reporting has suggested that Russian firms that w... Read more...
Dzhamilya Nigmatulina
While many commentators warn that AI will undermine employment and offer only modest productivity gains, empirical studies continue to suggest otherwise. With the right policies in place, the technology holds immense pot... Read more...
Philippe Aghion, Simon Bunel and Xavier Jaravel
14 January 2025
With Donald Trump's inauguration imminent, there are questions over the potential consequences of one of his signature policies: tariffs. While during the first Trump administration the UK wasn't too affected by the impo... Read more...
Adam Butlin
13 January 2025
Subjective wellbeing data are increasingly used across the social sciences. Yet, despite the widespread use of such data, the predictive power of approaches commonly used to model wellbeing is only limited. In response, ... Read more...
Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Niccolo Gentile, Caspar Kaiser, Ekaterina Oparina and Alexandre Tkatchenko
10 January 2025
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...
07 January 2025
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Bocar Ba (Duke University), joint with Meghna Baskar, Tony Cheng, and Rei Mariman
Wednesday 19 February 2025 15:00 - 16:00
Camille Terrier (Queen Mary University of London), Swati Dhingra (CEP, LSE), Anna Raute (Queen Mary University of London)
Wednesday 19 February 2025 18:00 - 19:30
Separately measuring firm buyer and seller power is important for policy-making, but challenging. In this paper, we suggest a new methodology to do so and apply it to French dairy processors. These firms exert buyer powe... Read more...
Etienne Guigue (LMU Munich), joint with Rémi Avignon
Thursday 20 February 2025 13:45 - 15:00
Jessica Schleider (Northwestern University)
Thursday 20 February 2025 16:00 - 17:00
TBC... Read more...
Alice Wu (Harvard)
Monday 24 February 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Shadi Farahzadi (Liverpool/CEP), joint with Patrick Bennet and Jessica Botros
Tuesday 25 February 2025 12:55 - 14:00
Laura Weiwu (MIT/Berkeley)
Wednesday 26 February 2025 12:30 - 14:00
Stelios Michalopoulos (Brown University)
Monday 03 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Gabriel Ulyssea (UCL)
Tuesday 04 March 2025 12:55 - 14:00
Romain Ferrali (Aix Marseille School of Economics)
Wednesday 05 March 2025 15:00 - 16:00
Nava Ashraf (LSE)
Thursday 06 March 2025 16:00 - 17:00
Daniele Paserman (Boston University)
Monday 10 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Astrid Kunze (Norwegian School of Economics), joint with Gozde Corekcioglu (Ozyegin University) and Marco Francesconi (University of Essex)
Tuesday 11 March 2025 12:55 - 14:00
Economic distortions—such as market power, taxes, credit constraints, etc.— are fundamental in understanding the difference between developing and developed economies. Recent work has documented the pervasive extent of e... Read more...
Federico Huneeus (Duke University), joint with David Atkin, Baptiste Bernadac, Dave Donaldson, Tishara Garg
Wednesday 12 March 2025 12:30 - 14:00
Valentin Bolotnyy (Stanford University)
Thursday 13 March 2025 16:00 - 17:00
Claudia Allende (Stanford)
Monday 17 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Kate Smith (LSE), joint with Arjan Lejour, Laurence O’Brien and David Sturrock
Tuesday 18 March 2025 12:55 - 14:00
Laura Boudreau (Columbia Business School), joint with Julia Cajal-Grossi, Canyon Can, and Rocco Macchiavello
Thursday 20 March 2025 13:45 - 15:00
Chiara Costi (University of Luxembourg)
Thursday 20 March 2025 16:00 - 17:00
Garima Sharma (Princeton)
Monday 24 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
This study explores whether it is possible to affect children’s aspirations and ambitions through a classroom-based intervention. We design and implement ORME, an Online Role-model Mentoring program, which consists of ex... Read more...
Amalia Di Girolamo (Birmingham Business School)
Tuesday 25 March 2025 12:55 - 14:00
Christian Krekel (CEP, LSE), Ekaterina Oparina (CEP)
Thursday 27 March 2025 16:00 - 17:00
Giuseppe Ippedico (Nottingham), joint with Jacopo Bassetto
Tuesday 01 April 2025 12:55 - 14:00
Maria Cotofan (CEP)
Thursday 03 April 2025 16:00 - 17:00
Katie Bollman (Oregon State University), joint with Benjamin Hansen, Edward Rubin, Garrett Stanford
Wednesday 30 April 2025 15:00 - 16:00
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