Centre for Economic Performance

Highlights

Image from CEP Covid series cover. Designer: Raphael Whittle

Covid-19 and the self-employed - 18 months into the crisis

Robert Blackburn, Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura find that more than a quarter of self-employed workers are struggling to pay for essentials, with parents and younger workers most likely to face financial difficulties.
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Photo of a wind farm. Published under CC0 Public Domain. Credit: Appolinary Kalashnikova. https://unsplash.com/photos/WYGhTLym344

The business response to Covid-19 one year on

Survey finds three quarters of businesses adopted new technologies during the pandemic. Read more...

Photo of a reflections on glass office buildings. Published under CC0 Public Domain. Credit: Robert Stump, https://unsplash.com/photos/sAg60JDU1IU/

Business time

Economy 2030 looks at how prepared UK's private sector is for the challenges of the upcoming decade. It finds firms need increasing - and targeted - investment that will require either increasing imports or limiting consumption.
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Latest

The Times

It’s time we stopped treating the self-employed as an afterthought

A report published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics shows, the self-employed have not fared well over the past couple of years. Even by the end of this summer they were ... Read more...

22 November 2021

CEP announcement

Job market best paper awards for Amanda Dahlstrand and Nikhil Datta

Congratulations to Amanda Dahlstrand and Nikhil Datta who have won UniCredit Foundation Econ Job Market Best Paper Awards. Dahlstrand, a PhD candidate in economics at LSE, has won an Econ Job Market Bes... Read more...

22 November 2021

The Economist

Britain’s economy does not lack oomph, but productivity is lagging

Joint research from the Centre for Economic Performance and the Resolution Foundation suggests that financial officers expect the amount of workers moving from shrinking to growing companies will spe... Read more...

20 November 2021

Economy 2030

Economy 2030 Inquiry: Six Months On

It is six months since the launch of The Economy 2030 inquiry – a two-year project that will examine the scale and impact of economic change that the UK is living through in the 2020s, and set out a plan... Read more...

19 November 2021

The New Statesman

What we're getting wrong about the "Great Resignation"

Alan Manning offers insights on trends in workers switching or leaving jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic. ... Read more...

17 November 2021

Financial Times

UK’s levelling-up agenda won’t solve productivity problem, report suggests

Findings from the Resolution Foundation and the Centre for Economic Performance challenge the government’s view that levelling up poorly performing companies or poorer regions will raise productivit... Read more...

15 November 2021

Financial Times

UK’s levelling-up agenda won’t solve productivity problem, report suggests

15 November 2021

CEP announcement

Josh De Lyon wins TIISA Young Scholar Award

Congratulations to Josh De Lyon who has won a Trade and Investment in Services Associates (TIISA) Young Scholar Award for his paper The Labour Market Effects of Services Importing: Evidence from the United Kin... Read more...

20 October 2021

BBC Radio 4

Today

Lee Elliot Major talks about the implementation of the National Tutoring Programme and the need to support disadvantaged children in post-pandemic recovery plans. ... Read more...

06 October 2021

The Economist

England’s pioneering mental-health programme hits a ceiling

Remembering Richard Layard's research on the need for evidence-based therapies, the Economist looks at developments in mental health provisions over the 15 years. ... Read more...

02 October 2021

BBC

In need of modernisation? The UK’s housing crisis close up

Paul Cheshire speaks on some of the wider problems of the UK housing market. ... Read more...

01 October 2021

CEP announcement

In memory of Professor David Marsden

David Marsden joined LSE as a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Relations in 1980. He had a long and distinguished career, first in the Department of Industrial Relations, where he was promoted to profe... Read more...

30 September 2021

Wharton Research Data Services

Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) best paper awarded to John Van Reenen

A Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) best paper award has been given to John Van Reenen, director of the Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID), and his co-authors Sabrina T. Howell, of New York Unive... Read more...

27 September 2021

The Economist

How German bombs shape London’s gangs

Tom Kirchmaier, Stephen Machin and Carmen Villa-Llera examine the relationship between areas of London that were bombed in the Second World War and crime rates. Discovering that the probability of finding a ga... Read more...

28 August 2021

The Observer

A million jobs in peril as one in 16 UK firms say they are at risk of closure

A million workers are still employed by businesses at risk of closure over the next three months, as the government is poised to withdraw critical Covid support schemes, according to new analysis by Peter Lamb... Read more...

15 August 2021

British Academy

Vernon Henderson and Barbara Petrongolo become Fellows of the British Academy

Congratulations to Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) associates Professor Vernon Henderson and Professor Barbara Petrongolo, who have been elected as new Fellows of the British Academy. They are among 8... Read more...

23 July 2021

The Economist

Domestic violence surges after a football match ends

A study by Ria Ivandic, Tom Kirchmaier and Neus Torres-Blas finds that a “considerable amount of domestic abuse” could be mitigated by arranging football fixtures on weekdays or... Read more...

09 July 2021

The Telegraph

Pupils missed more than half of classroom time during Covid pandemic

Amid calls to allow the option to repeat the entire school year, a major study by Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin finds Pupils have missed out on more than half ... Read more...

07 July 2021

LBC

Schoolchildren missed out on a third of learning during coronavirus pandemic

A study by Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin finds evidence that pupils across the UK have lost out on a third of their learning time amid Covid-19, even when home lessons a... Read more...

07 July 2021

The Independent

Day drinking and early kick-offs linked to rise in domestic abuse after football matches

Researchers find alcohol consumption - rather than heightened emotions - is to blame for rises in male-on-female violence following matches, and this could be reduced by more evening and weekend games. ... Read more...

05 July 2021

The Guardian

Early kick-offs linked to more alcohol abuse and violence in the home

Researchers at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance find alcohol consumption following football matches is fuelling domestic abuse in the hours after a game and suggest that... Read more...

04 July 2021

Bloomberg

Indians Prefer Job Guarantee Over Cash Handouts, LSE Study Says

A majority of urban Indians left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic want the government to guarantee them jobs like it does for people in rural areas, says a study by Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kon... Read more...

02 July 2021

The Telegraph

Scarred by Covid: As infections subside, India now faces a difficult road to recovery

Swati Dhingra speaks to the Telegraph about the impact of Covid-19 on attempts to overcome poverty in India, describing how many lower and middle urban workers are having to borrow money to make up for a ... Read more...

24 June 2021

Centre for Economic Performance

Xavier Jaravel named Best Young Economist of France, 2021

Congratulations to Dr Xavier Jaravel who has been named the Best Young Economist of France, 2021 by Le Monde and Le Cercle des économistes. The prize is awarded to a French economist under the age of... Read more...

03 June 2021

Forbes

Happiness Is Not ‘Out There.' It's Something You Create

Following the publication of the World Happiness report 2021, Rodger Dean Duncan interviews Richard Layard on happiness and mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. ... Read more...

01 June 2021

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CEP discussion papers

Product market competition, creative destruction and innovation

We examine the economic analysis of the relationship between innovation and product market competition. First, we give a brief tour of the intellectual history of the area. Second, we examine how the Aghion-Howitt framew... Read more...

Rachel Griffith and John Van Reenen

30 November 2021

Blog

The risks of prolonged higher inflation

With consumer prices rising at the fastest pace for three decades, what are the risks of prolonged higher inflation as a result of the current stance of fiscal and monetary policy, and what is the likely impact of an eas... Read more...

Romesh Vaitilingam

26 November 2021

CEP discussion papers

Air pollution and innovation

Existing estimates of the economic costs of air pollution do not account for its effect on inventive output. Using two weather phenomena as instruments, we estimate this effect in a sample of 1,288 European regions. A de... Read more...

Felix Bracht and Dennis Verhoeven

26 November 2021

Blog

The only way to substantially reduce the number of migrants crossing the Channel is through an agreement with France

Current government policy, whatever its rhetoric, is to muddle on, trying to deter crossings, trying to return migrants to safe countries but recognising that borders are inevitably porous. Muddling on is often an under-... Read more...

Alan Manning

26 November 2021

Blog

The Keys to Inclusive Growth

One of the COVID-19 pandemic's most important economic lessons is that innovation and inclusion need not be mutually exclusive. By pursuing the right policies, Western governments can promote both and thereby help to bri... Read more...

Philippe Aghion and Aymann Mhammedi

25 November 2021

Blog

Earning less than before COVID-19, the self-employed struggle to make ends meet

Amid the renewed drives for economic growth, self-employed workers still struggle to recover fully from the COVID-19 crisis. Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura write that In September 2021, 28% of workers reported financ... Read more...

Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura

24 November 2021

Blog

The Effects of College Capital Projects on Student Outcomes

In the 2020 budget the UK government committed 1.5 billion pounds over five years to improve further education colleges. Stephen Gibbons, Claudia Hupkau, Sandra McNally and Henry Overman write that the policy should help... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Claudia Hupkau, Sandra McNally and Henry G. Overman

23 November 2021

CVER Research Papers

The Effects of College Capital Projects on Student Outcome

The general debate on the relationship between school resources and student outcomes is an old and controversial one (for reviews see, for example, Hanushek, 1989, 1997 and Gibbons and McNally, 2013), although there is l... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Claudia Hupkau, Sandra McNally and Henry G. Overman

23 November 2021

Blog

Covid-19 spurred a wave of new technology adoption by UK businesses

The pandemic spurred three-quarters of firms to adopt new technologies, and businesses are keen to continue with this innovation mindset, which could be harnessed to fulfil the UK's net zero commitments. Anna Valero, Cap... Read more...

Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Capucine Riom and Anna Valero

22 November 2021

Blog

Some of the self-employed are still struggling amid uncertainty about whether they could claim grants

The self-employed have not recovered from the pandemic despite five rounds of government support, find Robert Blackburn (University of Liverpool), Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura (LSE). More than a quarter are in financ... Read more...

Robert Blackburn, Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura

19 November 2021

CEP Covid-19 analyses

Covid-19 and the self-employed - 18 months into the crisis

A year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, growth and economic recovery are the latest watchwords amongst labour market commentators in the UK. In this report we continue to monitor the situation of the self-employed ... Read more...

Robert Blackburn, Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura

18 November 2021

CEP discussion papers

Labor unions and the electoral consequences of trade liberalization

We show that the Brazilian trade liberalization in the early 1990s led to a permanent relative decline in the vote share of left-wing presidential candidates in the regions more affected by the tariff cuts. This happened... Read more...

Pedro Molina Ogeda, Emanuel Ornelas and Rodrigo R. Soares

17 November 2021

Blog

COVID-19 uncertainty: a tale of two tails

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive spike in uncertainty. This column uses data from panel surveys of US and UK business executives to document how uncertainty over own-firm sales growth rates over the... Read more...

David E. Altig, Lena Anayi, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer, Emil Mihaylov, Paul Mizen and Gregory Thwaites

16 November 2021

CEP discussion papers

From immediate acceptance to deferred acceptance: effects on school admissions and achievement in England

Countries and cities around the world increasingly rely on centralized systems to assign students to schools. Two algorithms, deferred acceptance (DA) and immediate acceptance (IA), are widespread. The latter is often cr... Read more...

Parag A. Pathak, Kevin Ren and Camille Terrier

15 November 2021

External publications

Business time

The UK is set for a decade of major change, with private sector firms in the front line. How ready are they for this change? What form should policy towards business take within a new economic strategy for the UK? This r... Read more...

Jesse Kozler, Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Pablo Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Anna Valero

15 November 2021

Blog

Social insurance policies in turbulent times: Short-time work versus unemployment insurance

While the US aggressively extended generosity of unemployment insurance in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, Europe heavily subsidised reductions in hours worked and temporary layoffs through short-time work or similar ... Read more...

Giulia Giupponi, Camille Landais and Alice Lapeyre

12 November 2021

CEP discussion papers

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...

Michael W. L. Elsby, Jennifer C. Smith and Jonathan Wadsworth

10 November 2021

Blog

How new technology can help clinical quality, productivity, and the healthcare workforce

Health information and communication technology (HICT) holds enormous potential to improve productivity. Several countries, the UK and the US included, have embraced this idea and spent billions of dollars on promoting H... Read more...

Ari Bronsoler, Joseph Doyle and John Van Reenen

10 November 2021

CEP Covid-19 analyses

The business response to Covid-19 one year on: findings from the second wave of the CEP-CBI survey on technology adoption

We present new data from a survey of 425 UK businesses conducted in July 2021 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which seeks to understand the ways in which firms have innovated one year on ... Read more...

Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Capucine Riom and Anna Valero

10 November 2021

Blog

Government policy fails to join the dots on the key challenges of innovation, net zero, and levelling up

Anna Valero writes that funding clean technologies, such as ocean and wind energy, can be a triple win, helping to address climate change, generating growth, and contributing to levelling up. Yet the 2021 Budget failed t... Read more...

Anna Valero

09 November 2021

Blog

Firm innovation in the post-pandemic world

In response to CEP research on firms adopting new technology in respons to Covid-19, Matias Belacin writes about the UK innovation strategy and the long-term plans to further boost innovation-led growth.... Read more...

Matias Belacin

08 November 2021

Blog

Bureaucracy and development

How does bureaucracy matter for development? Over the last years, an enormous interest in this question has created a large body of research, mostly focused around evidence from field experiments and micro-level administ... Read more...

Timothy Besley, Robin Burgess, Jonathan Old, Adnan Qadir Khan and Guo Xu

08 November 2021

CEP discussion papers

Efficient industrial policy for innovation: standing on the shoulders of hidden giants

Research and development is underprovided whenever it creates knowledge spillovers that drive a wedge between its total and private economic returns. Heterogeneity in the intensity of this market failure across technolog... Read more...

Charlotte Guillard, Ralf Martin, Pierre Mohnen, Catherine Thomas and Dennis Verhoeven

04 November 2021

CEP discussion papers

Have productivity and pay decoupled in the UK?

In the long-run at the macro level, the real pay of workers tends to follow labour productivity. In recent years, however, there have been concerns that this relationship has broken down and that pay has become "decouple... Read more...

Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

03 November 2021

CEP discussion papers

AI-tocracy

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the ... Read more...

Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman

02 November 2021

View all publications

CEP/DOM Capabilities, Competition and Innovation Seminars

The returns to face-to-face interactions: knowledge spillovers in Silicon Valley

David Atkin (MIT)

01 December 2021

CEP/LSE International Economics Seminars

The returns to face-to-face interactions: knowledge spillovers in Silicon Valley

David Atkin (MIT)

01 December 2021

CEP Policing and Crime Workshop

Effects of Covid-19 shutdowns on domestic violence in US cities

Amalia R. Miller (University of Virginia)

01 December 2021

CEP International Economics Workshops

Trade intermediaries and global production networks

Oscar Perello (UCL)

01 December 2021

Wellbeing Seminar Series

The Economics of Walking About and Predicting Unemployment

David Blanchflower (Dartmouth)

02 December 2021

CEP/Geography Urban and Regional Economics Seminars

The effect of mortgage regulation on entrepreneurship

Stephanie Johnson (Rice University)

03 December 2021

CEP/STICERD Applications Seminars

Navigating Stormy Waters: Crises, Selection, and Productivity Dynamics Under Financial Frictions

We build a growth model with heterogeneous firms that endogenizes productivity growth, firm selection, and borrowing under financial frictions. In particular, facing an incomplete financial market with endogenous (firm-s... Read more...

Ufuk Akcigit (University of Chicago)

06 December 2021