Skip to main content
School absence increased during the pandemic and remains high. This report investigates the persistent effects of Covid restrictions.
A week of events and public lectures encouraging economists from all fields to work on environmental issues and to connect research to policy change.
This new report argues that policies should be judged using a cost-benefit analysis which includes a comprehensive valuation of their effects on wellbeing.
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...
The World Happiness Report 2024 reveals that those in the UK feel they have a greater sense of freedom than Germans and believe there is less corruption in the country. When looking at age demographics, the largest gap b... Read more...
20 March 2024
The 2024 World Happiness Report found that lack of education, training and housing is behind loss of gen Z's traditionally positive outlook. Richard Layard, one of the report's authors, is clear that more effort is... Read more...
Sadiq Khan highlights modelling from the London School of Economics showing that a 10% rise in Londoners' living costs is accompanied by an eight per cent overall increase in violence, robberies, shoplifting, burglary an... Read more...
14 March 2024
Richard Layard discusses why happiness should be the fundamental goal of government and how policy can be shaped to prioritise people's wellbeing. ... Read more...
10 March 2024
In a statement to the Observer, Anna Valero, a former member of the chancellor’s economic advisory council, and Dimitri Zenghelis, a former head of economic forecasting at the Treasury, said the country needed to b... Read more...
02 March 2024
Daniel Chandler discusses how the Labour party can develop a "good jobs" policy where work would provide dignity and respect for everyone, and be a key source of people’s meaning and wellbeing. ... Read more...
19 February 2024
Thomas Sampson discusses how UK growth in goods exports and imports has been "the weakest in the G7", which has "contributed to the ongoing stagnation of the UK economy". ... Read more...
01 February 2024
How can economists help police forces to better assign their police officers onto the streets, thereby providing a better service to the public? In the Policing and Crime Research Group at the London School of Economics ... Read more...
25 January 2024
Dimitri Zenghelis, Esin Serin, Anna Valero, John Van Reenen and Bob Ward - authors of the LSE paper titled Boosting Growth and Productivity in the UK Through Investments in the Sustainable Economy - examine the fitness o... Read more...
22 January 2024
A Labour government should make the UK the world's first country to make policy based on its impact on wellbeing as well as the economy, says Richard Layard. ... Read more...
31 December 2023
View all news
Many of today's global problems, such as sustainability, technology, skills, and diversity can only be solved by organisations. This column argues that more work is needed to understand strategic management by firms, how... Read more...
Ghazala Azmat, Florian Englmaier, Alfonso Gambardella, Maria Guadalupe, Raffaella Sadun and Catherine Thomas
09 September 2024
Switching the delivery of one-to-one services from in-person to online offers potential cost savings and increased convenience, but what are the impacts on providers and consumers? This column studies the effects of onli... Read more...
Amanda Dahlstrand, Nestor Le Nestour and Guy Michaels
07 September 2024
Organisations don't just provide employment: they solve, or attempt to solve, important problems in our society. Organizational economics has made some impressive strides in recent years to show what choices organisation... Read more...
Ghazala Azmat
A high level of school absence has persisted across many countries since the COVID-19 pandemic. We use English data to investigate whether a student's absence during the pandemic had a causal impact on school attendance... Read more...
Stephen Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Piero Montebruno
This report investigates lost education time during the COVID-19 pandemic in England. We look at the general factors affecting rates of absence during different stages of the pandemic and the consequences of specific pol... Read more...
School absences increased massively during the Covid-19 pandemic and remain high internationally. We investigate whether policy variation in restrictions influenced pupil absence during the pandemic and how this affected... Read more...
What caused the end of antiquity, the shift of economic activity away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe? We assemble a large database of coin flows between the 4th and 10th century and use it to document the... Read more...
Johannes Boehm and Thomas Chaney
05 September 2024
Following the release of the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, there has been renewed research into profit shifting by multinational firms. This column utilises a novel dataset to show that well-managed subsidiaries... Read more...
Katarzyna Bilicka and Daniela Scur
04 September 2024
Governments of developed countries are facing growing pressures from the fiscal demands of an ageing population. To cope with this, they have tried to get individuals to work longer, primarily by raising the ages at whic... Read more...
David Frayman
Being on the move can spiral our mood up or down. There is well-known evidence that walking and cycling can directly improve our mental health as well as our physical health1; many of us have experienced feelings of free... Read more...
Sara MacLennan
The UK has a poor record of providing opportunities to learn skills for the around half of young people that do not attend university. Over a third of 18-year-olds in England are not undertaking any education or training... Read more...
In this paper we examine the cost-effectiveness of providing NICE recommended psychological therapy to young people. For each type of mental health problem we show: (i) the assumptions used to derive the impact of treati... Read more...
In this report we evaluate the benefits and costs of providing NICE recommended treatment for addiction or severe mental health problems over a two-year time horizon for one individual. We separately investigate addictio... Read more...
Isaac Parkes
Economics is famous for being the dismal science. Sadly, recent work highlighting the slowdown in productivity growth stretching back to the 1950s is no exception. But here Nicholas Bloom takes a more cheerful view becau... Read more...
Nicholas Bloom
We study the dynamic responses of political parties to gender quotas in South Korean municipal councils, a setting with nearly zero women pre-quota. We exploit two unique institutional features: the quota intensity is di... Read more...
Jay Euijung Lee and Martina Zanella
The government spends billions on our behalf. How do we want this money to be spent? This report reviews a range of policies and asks the fundamental question which should be asked of every policy: Does it deliver value ... Read more...
David Frayman, Christian Krekel, Richard Layard, Sara MacLennan and Isaac Parkes
We study the retail price pass-through of four major tax changes in petroleum products using daily pricing data from gas stations on small Greek islands. We find that (i) the pass-through of the tax hikes is five times h... Read more...
Christos Genakos, Blair Yuan Lyu and Mario Pagliero
30 August 2024
This paper evaluates the impact of two large export finance support schemes on firm-level export performance. The Export Finance Scheme (EFS) and the Long-Term Finance Facility for Plant & Machinery (LTFF), provide loans... Read more...
Fabrice Defever, Alejandro Riano and Gonzalo Varela
Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, ... Read more...
Andrés Barrios Fernández, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman
28 August 2024
The choices that British 16-year-olds are making in the next few weeks about their future studies matter not just for them and their families but also for the nation's economy. Britain needs a workforce with graduate-le... Read more...
Aadya Bahl
22 August 2024
Labour promised serious reforms to the planning system while in opposition. What it has proposed now that it's in Government, including reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework, is very far from a fundamental re... Read more...
Paul Cheshire
19 August 2024
Perhaps the proposal that people are most aware of when it comes to Labour's planning reform plans, the one that hit the headlines, is the idea of potentially re-defining small areas of green belts as "grey belt land". T... Read more...
This paper investigates the reversibility of the effects of transport infrastructure investments, based on a programme that removed much of the rail network in Britain during the mid-20th century. We find that a 10% loss... Read more...
Stephen Gibbons, Stephan Heblich and Edward W. Pinchbeck
17 August 2024
In today's hybrid world, many decisions affect which one-to-one services, such as financial advice, tutoring or healthcare, are delivered online and which ones in person, and to whom. Although the shift to online provisi... Read more...
16 August 2024
In this podcast episode dedicated to the new edition of the Handbook of Labor Economics, Professor from the London School of Economics discusses the recent advances in the Economics of Crime. What are the economic con... Read more...
Stephen Machin
15 August 2024
View all publications
A week of events encouraging economists to work on environmental issues and to connect research to policy change.... Read more...
Various speakers
Monday 23 September 2024 - Thursday 26 September 2024
Read more...
Pablo Slutzky (University of Maryland)
Wednesday 02 October 2024 15:00 - 16:00
Mike Laforest (US Air Force Academy)
Wednesday 16 October 2024 15:00 - 16:00
TBC... Read more...
Jacob Moscona (Harvard)
Monday 04 November 2024 12:00 - 13:30
We develop a tractable equilibrium model of the labour market, featuring heterogeneous labour supply elasticities across occupations that can be estimated in a baseline period using observed worker flows. We use this mod... Read more...
Aitor Irastorza Fabrique (Institute for Fiscal Studies), joint with Michael J. Böhm and Ben Etheridge
Tuesday 05 November 2024 12:55 - 14:00
Rocco d'Este (University of Sussex)
Wednesday 06 November 2024 15:00 - 16:00
Ben Handel (University of California, Berkeley)
Monday 11 November 2024 12:00 - 13:30
Modern knowledge-intensive work involves significant specialization (Jones 2009) and is often coordinated using knowledge hierarchies (Garicano 2000), where experts handle the most specialized tasks, leaving more common ... Read more...
Guy Michaels (CEP, LSE), joint with Amanda Dahlstrand, Shan Huang, Nestor Le Nestor
Tuesday 12 November 2024 12:55 - 14:00
Dean Knox (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
Wednesday 13 November 2024 15:00 - 16:00
Evan Rose (University of Chicago)
Monday 18 November 2024 12:00 - 13:30
Discussing and reflecting on the research and legacy of Daniel Kahneman.... Read more...
Paul Dolan (LSE), Gillian Tett (University of Cambridge)
Monday 18 November 2024 18:30 - 20:00
Diego Battiston (University of Edinburgh and CEP, LSE)
Tuesday 19 November 2024 12:55 - 14:00
Karmini Sharma (Imperial College London)
Wednesday 20 November 2024 15:00 - 16:00
Richard Hornbeck (The University of Chicago Booth School of Business)
Monday 25 November 2024 12:00 - 13:30
How do firms and inventors move through knowledge space as they develop their innovations? We propose a method for tracking patterns of exploration and exploitation in patenting behaviour in the US for the period since 1... Read more...
Mirko Draca (University of Warwick and CEP)
Tuesday 26 November 2024 12:55 - 14:00
Patricio Dominguez (Pontificial Catholic University of Chile)
Wednesday 27 November 2024 15:00 - 16:00
Nina Buchmann (Yale)
Monday 02 December 2024 12:00 - 13:30
Using two polygenic risk scores (PRS) for educational attainment obtained from a biomedical study of all those born in a single week in Great Britain in 1958 we show that the genetic predisposition for educational attain... Read more...
Alex Bryson (University College London)
Tuesday 03 December 2024 12:55 - 14:00
Attila Lindner (University College London)
Tuesday 10 December 2024 12:55 - 14:00
Analisa Packham (Vanderbilt University)
Wednesday 11 December 2024 15:00 - 16:00
Alice Wu (Harvard)
Monday 24 February 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Stelios Michalopoulos (Brown University)
Monday 03 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Daniele Paserman (Boston University)
Monday 10 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Claudia Allende (Stanford)
Monday 17 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Garima Sharma (Princeton)
Monday 24 March 2025 12:00 - 13:30
View all events
