POID

Blog

Project Syndicate:

The Mismeasurement of Europe's Productivity

The Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman uses the wrong metric - purchasing power parity - to make the case that Europe is not lagging far behind the US in terms of productivity. The right metric shows that the gap is g...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics:

A more productive economy is being delivered under this Labour government

The Labour government set raising economic growth as its central target while in power. The new figures published by the Office for National Statistics suggest that the economy is doing a lot better than expected. John V...Read more...

CEP report

Catalysing climate resilience

The UK is experiencing increasing impacts from climate change, including more frequent and severe floods, heatwaves and storms. It needs to prepare more for these impacts. It also needs to honour its pledge to support cl...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

How UK firms are responding to the war in Iran: Early evidence from the Decision Maker Panel

The conflict in the Middle East has pushed energy prices sharply higher, but the implications for UK inflation will depend on the scale and duration of the shock as well as its propagation through firms' costs, prices, m...Read more...

Blog

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta:

How Much Are Firms Spending on AI (and What Will Happen to Headcounts)?

Nicholas Bloom and his co-authors investigate AI adoption in firms to understand how much companies are spending on AI and what the impact will be on the composition of their workforces....Read more...

Blog

Transform work:

Transform work with Raffaella Sadun, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (podcast)

Raffaella's work sits at the intersection of economics, leadership, and the future of work. Drawing on large-scale data and real-world field experiments inside major companies, she explores how hybrid work is reshaping l...Read more...

Blog

LSE United States Politics and Policy:

Polarization is not a myth: it is reflected in the creation and spread of new technologies

Can work be separated from politics? As the United States becomes increasingly politically polarised, Gaia Dossi and Marta Morando find that inventors split along party lines with Democrat-affiliated inventors more likel...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Remote work can blunt the fertility decline

Fertility has fallen to very low levels in many advanced economies, and many pro-natalist policies appear to deliver only modest gains at a high cost. Using survey data from 38 countries, this article shows that both pla...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Measuring national technological trajectories using 200 years of international patent data

Innovation underpins sustained long-run economic growth, yet measuring technological success is challenging. This column compiles two centuries of patent data and leverages filings in multiple patent offices to document ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Spillovers from science

Quantifying spillovers from scientific knowledge to technology is important for understanding the social returns to science and for designing policy. A key challenge is how to credit scientific work with the value genera...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Everything you thought you knew about local markets is wrong

In retail markets, competition among firms happens "locally". But what is the right way to define the local geographic market? Using a natural experiment involving petrol stations on Greek islands and in Athens, Christos...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Firms predict an AI productivity boom is coming

Comparable international survey data on artificial intelligence adoption by firms is still lacking. This column surveys over 5,000 CFOs, CEOs, and executives from stratified firm samples across the US, UK, Germany and Au...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Ray of hope? The rise of solar energy in China

China's solar industry is a poster child for the country’s economic rise over the last four decades. The output of Chinese solar grew by 76% annually between 2004 and 2013, and by 2019 Chinese firms accounted for 63% o...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Policy Modeling:

Social policy gone bad educationally: Unintended peer effects from transferred students

What is the impact of an increase of lower-ability students in a university class? We examine a natural experiment in which students from large, low-income families had the chance to transfer to academic programs at a lo...Read more...

Blog

VoxDev:

Is quality upgrading in agriculture a path to poverty reduction?

Under standard conditions in the Colombian coffee sector, the benefits of producing better coffee are not passed on to farmers, weakening their incentives to invest in higher-quality production. However, when a large int...Read more...

Blog

Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR):

Econ To Go | How remote work is redefining our lives

How has remote work changed the way we live and work? And what's here to stay? In the first episode of Econ To Go, Neale Mahoney sits down with Stanford economist Nick Bloom, one of the world's leading experts on work-...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Firm data on AI

We present the first representative international data on firm-level AI use. We survey almost 6000 CFOs, CEOs and executives from stratified firm samples across the US, UK, Germany and Australia. We find four key facts. ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Mapping Technological Trajectories: Evidence from two centuries of patent data

We introduce a methodology to measure cross-country trends in innovation capability - "technological trajectories" and implement this on a new rich dataset covering patents between 1836 and 2016 across multiple countries...Read more...

POID Working Paper

What is the right geographic market definition?

This paper examines the "right" geographic definition of relevant markets by analyzing how excise tax pass-through varies with local competition in the retail gasoline market of a large metropolitan city. Using a natural...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Ray of Hope? China and the rise of solar energy

Do industrial policies that promote clean energy offer a "ray of hope", increasing a country's growth and welfare, whilst simultaneously reducing carbon emissions? We study the impact of Chinese solar subsidies whose imp...Read more...

CEP report

Pathways to a productive and inclusive net zero

The transition to net zero can bring economic benefits - improving productivity and living standards while tackling climate change and this collection of briefing papers shows how. Pathways to productive and inclusive ne...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Resolving the automation paradox: falling labor share, rising wages

A central socioeconomic concern about Artificial Intelligence is that it will lower wages by depressing the labor share - the fraction of economic output paid to labor. We show that declining labor share is more likely t...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Misaligned by Design: incentive failures in machine learning

The cost of error in many high-stakes settings is asymmetric: misdiagnosing pneumonia when absent is an inconvenience but failing to detect it when present can be life-threatening. Accordingly, artificial intelligence (A...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Why inflation may respond faster to big shocks: The rise of state-dependent pricing

Macroeconomic models distinguish time-dependent pricing, where firms change prices at fixed intervals, from state-dependent pricing, where firms change prices in response to changing demand or costs. This column presents...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Leveraging subjective expectations for production functions

We propose estimating production functions using firms' subjective expectations of future output and inputs; data which are becoming increasingly available in surveys. This note compares their proposed estimator to tradi...Read more...