RLAB IT Demo

CEP discussion paper

Universities, new tasks, and the rise of services

Structural transformation from manufacturing to services varies sharply across US regions. We document that regions with universities, especially highly ranked research institutions, experience faster growth in high-skil...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Geopolitics and export miracles: firm-level evidence from US war procurement in Korea

How did geopolitics shape East Asia's economic development? We find that US military procurement during the Vietnam War - a shock which peaked at nearly 3% of South Korean GDP, rivaling the Marshall Plan - catalyzed Kore...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Firms slice up global production to protect their knowhow

Imitation is a first-order concern for enterprises operating global production processes. Firms routinely source knowledge-intensive inputs from many countries, including those with weak intellectual property laws. This ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Female-targeted hiring subsidies, firm learning, and women’s employment

Women often struggle to re-enter employment after career breaks, possibly because employers are uncertain about their productivity. We study whether hiring subsidies help firms overcome this uncertainty and hire from thi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Defense promotion and industrial development

Major economies are rearming, and rearmament is itself industrial policy. I ask whether defense promotion—especially innovation policy—can drive industrial development beyond the defense sector. I synthesize evidence on ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is data privacy a losing game? Evidence from Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy

We study the impact of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which requires apps to obtain explicit user permission before cross-app tracking, on the mobile gaming industry. Using SensorTower US data on the top...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational income persistence in the Millennial generation

This paper provides new evidence on intergenerational income persistence for a recent UK cohort. Using Next Steps, a longitudinal study of people born in England in 1989-90 linked to administrative education records, we ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brief yet effective: group counseling and college access for disadvantaged students

Large socioeconomic gaps in higher-education access and completion persist even among similarly talented students with access to generous funding, pointing to an important role for information frictions and unequal suppo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teachers' leniency: experimental evidence

Two teachers grading the same student can reach very different conclusions— yet little is known about which teacher characteristics drive such disagreement. We investigate this question through a large-scale online exper...Read more...

Blog

Promarket:

American Slaveholders Lost Their Wealth but Kept Their Political Power

In new research, Luna Bellani, Anselm Hager, and Stephan Maurer examine how the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War affected the political influence of former slaveholders. Despite the blow to their economi...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Without radical planning reform, Burnham cannot build the houses he's promising

Governments keep promising to build more houses, and keep failing to do so. Now, Andy Burnham has upped the challenge by promising not just more houses, but specifically more council houses since World War II. Paul Chesh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dynamic effects of trade

The existence of aggregate welfare gains from trade is one of the classic insights from international economics. However, these conventional welfare gains are static, in the sense that they take existing factor supplies ...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Editorial: Europe in a changing world: resilience, industrial policy, and the political economy of fragmentation

The papers collected in this special issue originate from the 2024 Annual Research Conference (ARC 2024), organized by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy, in collaboration with DG ECFIN...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Endogenous mobility in pandemics: theory and evidence from the United States

We analyze infectious diseases in a general equilibrium model with endogenous mobility, where forward-looking agents weigh disease risks against economic opportunities in cross-regional mobility decisions. This generates...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China’s world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...Read more...

Blog

VoxTalks:

Tariff Confusion (podcast)

If you run a business that exports to the United States, how big is the tariff you have to pay? In 2025 that question was hard to answer. Between February and December, 53 separate announcements introduced, delayed, rein...Read more...

Blog

The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes (podcast):

Will AI solve the productivity puzzle? With Nick Bloom

Productivity has been a problem for the past 15 years. In developed countries, weak demand, a lack of competition and a paucity of new ideas have all been blamed. Could AI finally reverse that trend? Soumaya speaks to St...Read more...

Blog

Project Syndicate:

Silicon, Not Software, Will Decide the AI Race

The AI race is no longer just about building better models. As competition shifts from scientific discovery to deployment, success increasingly depends on computing power, advanced semiconductors, physical infrastructure...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employer market power: models and methods

It is now widely recognized that employers hold some wage-setting power over workers, and several recent reviews cover the resulting surge of research on monopsony. We take a high-level view, introducing the idea of the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The equilibrium impact of credit frictions: evidence from default risk using firm-level data

This paper examines the impact of credit frictions arising from firm-level default risk on aggregate economic performance. We build a micro-to-macro model with heterogeneous firms and sector-specific production functions...Read more...

Blog

LSE Management:

How America out-deindustrialised Europe

Despite the prevailing narrative of Western deindustrialisation as one of a rigid Europe and a dynamic America, Richard Baldwin, Saul Estrin, and Bob Hancke argue that the comparison of the EU with the US turns this narr...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Nature: Green and blue space in urban areas and engagement with nature

The natural environment has been shown to improve wellbeing, mental and physical health and a range of wider positive outcomes. But what can the government do? And are investments in "nature" value for money? There are ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Industrial Economics:

Asymmetric pass-through and competition

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...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The economic dynamics of city structure: evidence from Hiroshima's recovery

We provide new theory and evidence on the resilience of the internal city structure after a large shock by analyzing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Exploiting newly digitized data, we document that the city structure r...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Andy Burnham's biggest challenge isn't Britain's old class system - it's the new one

Britain's new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is more "Evertonian" than "Etonian", notes Lee Elliot Major: with his working class roots and political identity rooted in North West England, he marks a radical break with the...Read more...