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CEP discussion paper

Minority bureaucrats' networks and career progression: evidence from the Chinese maritime customs service

Do minorities benefit from social networks? In this paper, we study this question using the historical example of China's first modern bureaucratic organization, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Drawing on newly dig...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The end of the Amazon soy moratorium will accelerate deforestation

Rules preventing the purchase of soy grown on land cleared after 2008 slowed deforestation in the Amazon and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. But now pressure is mounting in Brazil for the rules to be loosened. Rhamon T...Read more...

Book

Why Immigration Policy Is Hard: And How to Make It Better

Immigration policy is hard, involving difficult decisions and trade-offs. But, as Alan Manning - former chair of the UK's Migration Advisory Committee - makes clear, this doesn't mean that we can't do much better. We sh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mind the lag: Using assessed and list prices as proxies for housing market values

Property transaction prices are widely regarded as the best measure of property value, but are sometimes unavailable. Using data from the Netherlands and New York, we analyze whether list prices and assessed values are r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Accommodating emerging giants in the global economy

How has aggregate income and welfare in the United States been affected by globalization and rapid productivity growth in emerging economies? We use the class of constant elasticity trade models to provide quantitative e...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Budget 2025 - how to cure the UK's low productivity

Productivity powers economic growth and shapes living standards. Yet the UK continues to falter on both counts. Low productivity and weak investment have become defining features of the economy, and this year's Budget wi...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Can we explain why inflation in the UK is higher than in the Euro Area?

Swati Dhingra of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee argues that UK inflation is more similar to Europe than it seems, and therefore rate cuts are possible without threatening the return of inflation to targe...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Explainer: What is economic productivity?

Productivity powers economic growth and raises living standards. But the UK has witnessed a prolonged period of stagnation, marked by weak economic productivity growth. While the reasons behind this slowdown are often de...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Economics of climate innovation: technology, climate policy, and the clean energy transition

We examine the economics of climate innovation and its role in the clean technology transition. It outlines the incentives, market failures, and policy levers that shape the development and diffusion of clean technologie...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Could new tenants' rights usher in rent controls? Here's why that wouldn't necessarily be a positive

The new Renters' Rights Act introduces provisions to protect tenants in England against rent increases. While the UK government says it "does not support the introduction of rent controls", the act does allow tenants to ...Read more...

Blog

The WorkLab podcast:

Harvard's Raffaella Sadun on why it's so hard to become a Frontier Firm

The business school professor shares insights on the human cost of change, making progress without a playbook, and how leaders can turn AI experiments into a competitive advantage. ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal: Forthcoming

The rise and fall of the price-to-rent ratio: why are superstar cities different?

In most countries, during the 2000s and 2010s, house prices rose substantially relative to rents. This trend, however, was not uniform across space or time. The price-to-rent ratio increased much more strongly in the cou...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Does getting richer make people happier?

The relationship between economic growth and happiness is not as straightforward as it first appears. While higher income is associated with greater wellbeing, other factors like healthcare and friendship are important t...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Great Recession affected millennial education and careers

In 2025 the proportion of young British people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training was at its highest since 2014. How much impact do educational choices made at that age have on future careers...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When do employers share? Rent sharing, monopsony and minimum wages

When firm productivity or product demand rises, workers typically share in the gains through higher wages or expanded employment. We show that for firms under monopsony with a binding minimum wage, this link from firm ga...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cleaner energy, higher risk? Firm-level exposure to critical minerals

To what extent has the rise of clean energy technologies created new vulnerabilities in global supply chains? In this paper, I study the role of a new type of 'input uncertainty' associated with critical minerals that un...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A familiar offence: how households shape juvenile reoffending

In this paper we focus on how the criminal history of a household affects juvenile reoffending. Using detailed administrative data from Greater Manchester Police for 2007-2018, we construct a matched sample of 15,548 juv...Read more...

Journal article

Italian Economic Journal:

Artificial Intelligence in Education: Computer-Assisted Learning and AI-guided Tutors

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) offer powerful tools to improve foundational skills and close educational gaps, with evidence showing meaningful gains in student performance, especially ...Read more...

Journal article

World Development:

Virtuous outcomes of instrumental intentions? The case of Uruguay’s 1996 constitutional reform

In December 1996 a national referendum approved a constitutional reform that introduced substantial changes to Uruguay’s electoral system. We argue that this reform was proposed by Uruguay’s establishment parties to prev...Read more...

Blog

LSE USAPP:

The US-China rare earths deal shows the importance of critical materials in a new era of strategic interdependence

The accelerating shift to clean energy and advanced technologies is redrawing the map of global economic power. As nations and firms race to secure critical minerals, rare earths - small in trade value but high in strate...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Bred to rule: What a £180,000 private tutor job reveals about the education arms race

What does a £180,000 job ad for a private tutor *for a baby* reveal about the global education arms race? It's tempting to put it down to the eccentric indulgence of a tiny global elite. But it in fact points to an expl...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

How new renters' rights could drive landlords out of the market

Many elements of the renters' rights bill are likely to improve the lives of renters without harming landlords. But some of the improvements for tenants will make being a landlord more difficult or even, for some, undesi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Anatomy of automation: CNC machines and industrial robots in UK manufacturing, 2005-2023

Using a novel proprietary survey of UK manufacturing sites, we study the impact on employment of arguably the two most important industrial automation technologies of the past fifty years: computer numerical control (CNC...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Better stealing than dealing: how do felony theft thresholds impact crime?

From 2005 to 2019, forty US states raised the dollar value threshold delineating misdemeanor and felony theft, reducing the expected punishment for a subset of property crimes. Using an event study framework, we observe ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Confusopoly unveiled: How firms use complexity to raise prices

Can entire markets strategically confuse consumers to raise prices? This column tracks the prices of nearly all mobile phone tariffs and handsets in the UK from 2010 to 2012, and finds that quality-adjusted prices rise i...Read more...