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Breaking down the US tariffs and what they mean for the UK, global trade and supply chains.
A new survey of UK firms reveals how innovation has evolved post-pandemic amid economic shocks, with larger, digitized businesses leading adoption.
Breakthrough innovations surged when women gained economic rights, proving the power of inclusive policies in driving growth.
Thomas Sampson speaks to presenter Tim Harford about the US tariffs on global trade that were announced by president Donald Trump on 2 April 2025 ... Read more...
04 April 2025
Richard Layard writing in the Financial Times, says that a clear commitment to train young people for work will help the government's economic agenda. ... Read more...
21 March 2025
The UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has awarded the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) £9.2mn for its five-year programme of work from 2025. This renewed funding will enable CEP to co... Read more...
18 March 2025
Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber comment on proposed changes to the planning system in Britain, arguing the government has shied away from the reform that is needed. ... Read more...
04 March 2025
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
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Public speeches by leaders can serve as a cost-effective tool for fostering peace, yet their effectiveness remains uncertain, particularly in divided societies experiencing violent conflict. This paper examines the impac... Read more...
Mathieu Couttenier, Sophie Hatte, Lucile Laugerette and Tommaso Sonno
25 April 2025
The announced US tariffs and the retaliatory actions taken by China have intensified. If the threats are carried out, they will drive the average implied US tariff to exceed 20 per cent, a level not seen since the 1930s.... Read more...
Jose P Vasquez
17 April 2025
We investigate the diffusion of frontier technologies across German firms be-fore and during the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations behind technology investments, us... Read more...
Melanie Arntz, Michael J. Bohm, Georg Graetz, Terry Gregory, Florian Lehmer and Cacilia Lipowski
16 April 2025
How should UK exporters react to the tariffs imposed by President Trump? Some manufacturers may decide to increase production in the US, but those with loyal US consumers who are relatively insensitive to price changes m... Read more...
Catherine Thomas
Artificial Intelligence is set to change our lives, but there are many doubts about whether this will be for the better. By looking at a case of non-surveillance application of AI used to help with crowd management, Tom ... Read more...
Tom Kirchmaier
15 April 2025
There is a pressing need for a universal measure of children's wellbeing, parallel to the WELLBY, for use in cost-benefit analysis. Currently, there is no consensus on how to value the wellbeing of children, raising conc... Read more...
Isaac Parkes
In this second instalment of his interview with Alexis Papazoglou, Thomas Sampson highlights the many uncertainties the future of global trade faces and argues that the biggest policy question for countries around the wo... Read more...
Alexis Papazoglou and Thomas Sampson
11 April 2025
Donald Trump's announcement of wide-ranging tariffs has threatened to upend the rules of global trade that have been in place for decades, impacting supply chains and businesses across the world. The US President's pla... Read more...
Jonathan Haskel
10 April 2025
This paper combines ten years of idiosyncratic variation in school closure dates for all secondary schools in England with administrative records of educational and criminal trajectories linked at the individual level to... Read more...
Janine Boshoff, Stephen Machin and Matteo Sandi
In this interview with Alexis Papazoglou, Thomas Sampson explains what the US tariffs mean for the UK economy and answers questions on the effects of Brexit on the UK's ability to negotiate the tariffs, as well as on wha... Read more...
We develop a model of endogenous growth and firm dynamics with soft budget constraints, where firms differ in their innovation speed and slower firms need additional financing in order to eventually innovate. As creditor... Read more...
Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Mathias Dewatripont and Johannes Matt
Rigorous evaluation improves our understanding of the effectiveness of local economic policies. Robust evaluation can be challenging but can answer many questions and lead to a more nuanced understanding. By learning fro... Read more...
Luz Yadira Gómez-Hernández
09 April 2025
In this film, we explore how cutting-edge artificial intelligence is being developed to assist event security and police forces in managing public safety at large-scale gatherings. We speak with Professor Tom Kirchmaier ... Read more...
08 April 2025
Last week's announcement of sweeping US tariffs will have a big impact on global trade. The method used to calculate the tax rates to be charged on imports from individual countries has surprised economists. For the UK, ... Read more...
Richard Davies, Joshua Hellings and Finn McEvoy
07 April 2025
This paper discusses ideas for incorporating the study of happiness and other measures of self-reported or subjective well-being (SWB) into undergraduate economics courses. We begin by motivating why students of economic... Read more...
Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz, John Ifcher, Ekaterina Oparina and Stephen Wu
How does dismantling deep integration affect international trade? This column uses firm-level customs data to study the impact of Brexit on UK goods trade. The authors find that in the short term, exit from the Single Ma... Read more...
Rebecca Freeman, Marco Garofalo, Enrico Longoni, Kalina Manova, Rebecca Mari, Thomas Prayer and Thomas Sampson
A central driver of economic growth is new technology. Gaia Dossi and Davide Coluccia show how migrants from Britain to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century not only brought new ideas with them but helped US in... Read more...
Davide M. Coluccia and Gaia Dossi
The Bank of England Agenda for Research (BEAR) sets the key areas for new research at the Bank over the coming years. This post is an example of issues considered under the Prudential Architecture Theme which focuses on ... Read more...
Isabelle Roland, Yukiko U. Saito and Philip Schnattinger
03 April 2025
Since 2021, developed countries have experienced a significant inflation episode. This column uses Decision Maker Panel data from UK CEOs and CFOs to study firms' inflation perceptions and expectations around monthly off... Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov
02 April 2025
In this policy brief, we present new data from a survey of 373 UK firms conducted in May 2024 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). This is a follow-up to our two earlier surveys which revealed... Read more...
Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Bruno Serra-Lorenzo and Anna Valero
Should immigration be regarded as an exogenous shock? If so, what is its effect on native wages? Might any effect differ across different sectors of the economy? In this paper we answer these questions by applying macroe... Read more...
Andrew Mountford and Jonathan Wadsworth
01 April 2025
Field experiments show that employers are less likely to consider long-term unemployed job-seekers for interviews. We study the implications for optimal unemployment insurance (UI). Based on a structural model of job sea... Read more...
Mario Meier and Tim Obermeier
Living wages are an increasingly common policy tool for reducing poverty and improving the living standards of low-income workers. But until recently, there has been little evidence on how living wage clauses effect the ... Read more...
Nikhil Datta and Stephen Machin
31 March 2025
We constantly hear of exciting new ways AI tools can help to tackle economic problems and the productivity gains they bring. However, benefits can only materialize when firms actually use AI.... Read more...
Antonin Bergeaud, Guzman Gonzalez-Torres Fernandez, Vincent Labhard and Richard Sellner
28 March 2025
The UK's job seeker's allowance for those who lose their job is much lower than the OECD average. Aadya Bahl argues that improving unemployment support is key not just for protecting workers but also for unlocking econom... Read more...
Aadya Bahl
26 March 2025
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Katie Bollman (Oregon State University), joint with Benjamin Hansen, Edward Rubin, Garrett Stanford
Wednesday 30 April 2025 15:00 - 16:00
Diego Puga (Center for Monetary & Financial Studies (CEMFI))
Wednesday 07 May 2025 12:30 - 14:00
A two day conference discussing recent work on the economics of crime and the criminal justice system.... Read more...
Various speakers
Thursday 08 May 2025 - Friday 09 May 2025
TBC... Read more...
Anna Stansbury (MIT)
Friday 09 May 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Zoe Cullen (Harvard Business School)
Monday 12 May 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Henrik Sigstad (BI Norwegian Business School), joint with Guilherme Lambais, Ricardo Raoni Werlang Prioste
Wednesday 14 May 2025 15:00 - 16:00
Maisy Wong (Wharton University)
Thursday 15 May 2025 12:30 - 14:00
The annual conference for CEP members.... Read more...
Monday 19 May 2025 - Tuesday 20 May 2025
Affirmative action and preferential admission policies play a crucial role in fostering social mobility by bolstering the prospects of disadvantaged groups. In this paper, we analyze the longterm effects of a Chilean po... Read more...
Michela Tincani (University College London), joint with Michela Carlana and Enrico Miglino
Monday 19 May 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Joe Shapiro (UC Berkeley)
Wednesday 21 May 2025 12:30 - 14:00
Jens Ludwig (University of Chicago)
Wednesday 21 May 2025 15:00 - 16:00
Jessie Handbury (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)
Wednesday 28 May 2025 12:30 - 14:00
Discussing the economics of education and skills by exploring student choice, tracking, and inequality.... Read more...
Thursday 29 May 2025 - Friday 30 May 2025
tbc... Read more...
Carolyn Stein (Berkeley)
Friday 30 May 2025 12:00 - 13:30
David Deming (Harvard Kennedy School)
Monday 02 June 2025 12:00 - 13:30
Teresa Fort (Dartmouth College)
Tuesday 03 June 2025 16:00 - 18:00
Juliana Londono-Velez (UCLA)
Monday 09 June 2025 12:00 - 13:30
The panel explore how we can identify cost-effective policies to improve societal wellbeing — and why it will be key to shaping the future of the UK and beyond... Read more...
Martin Knapp (LSE), Laura Taylor (Oxford University)
Friday 20 June 2025 13:30 - 14:30
How can we shape engaging work environments that foster productivity and enable workers to flourish?... Read more...
Chris Pissarides (CEP, LSE), Mary O'Mahony (Kings College London and the Productivity Institute)
Wednesday 25 June 2025 18:30 - 20:00
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