POID

Blog

European Economic Association:

2025 Nobel Laureate: Philippe Aghion

John Van Reenen writes about the profound influence of Nobel laureate Philippe Aghion's work not only on growth and industrial organisation, but also on fields as diverse as trade, labour, taxation, the environment, poli...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Strategic Confusopoly: Evidence from the UK mobile telecommunications market

Can entire markets strategically confuse consumers to raise market prices? Using a detailed dataset covering virtually all mobile phone tariffs and their handsets in the United Kingdom between January 2010 and September ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Resetting the innovation clock: Endogenous growth through technological turnover

We propose a model of endogenous economic growth with "weak" scale effects and diminishing returns to innovation at the micro level. In our model, entrants introduce new technologies through research and incumbents incre...Read more...

Blog

World Bank Blogs:

Learning amid disruption: a feasible, effective, and scalable investment in education during wartime

Wars devastate infrastructure and institutions, but their most profound costs are often borne by human capital. Education systems are among the first casualties of conflict: schools are destroyed, and families are displa...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Investing in Human Capital During Wartime: Experimental evidence from Ukraine

This paper provides insights into human capital investments during wartime by presenting evidence from three experiments of an online tutoring program for Ukrainian students amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Conducted b...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Good Rents versus Bad Rents: R&D misallocation and growth

Firm price-cost markups may reflect (a) bigger step sizes from quality innovations that confer significant knowledge spillovers onto other firms, and/or (b) higher process efficiency than competing firms or other factors...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Escaping Labor Scarcity: Innovation and human capital after WW1 in France

We use quasi-random local variation in the number of young men who died as a result of World War I to estimate the impact of this demographic shock on innovation and structural change in France. Our analysis shows that e...Read more...

Blog

Liberty Street Economics:

How Firms Spread Good Management

What is good management, and how is it transmitted across firms and plants? In a recent paper, we use survey and administrative data, coupled with a structural model of management, to explore these questions. We show tha...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The impact of the 2025 US tariff announcements on UK firms

In the first half of 2025, the US and some of its trading partners announced significant changes to import tariffs. This column uses newly designed questions to study the impact of these changes on UK firms and to assess...Read more...

CEP report

The innovation race on geological carbon removal: who is best placed to lead?

This report analyses innovation activity represented by patenting data for two carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies - bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACC...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Expertise

When job tasks are automated, does this augment or diminish the value of labor in the tasks that remain? We argue the answer depends on whether removing tasks raises or reduces the expertise required for remaining non-au...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Remote work, employee mix, and performance

We study the shift to fully remote work at a large call center in Turkey, highlighting three findings. First, fully remote work increased the share of women, including married women, rural and smaller-town residents. By ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Rationalizing firm forecasts

We partner with a large US payment-processing company to run a 5-year, 10 wave panel survey of incentivized quarterly sales forecasts on over 6,000 firms. We match firm predictions to proprietary revenue data to assess a...Read more...

POID Working Paper

The new geography of labor markets

We use matched employer-employee data to study where Americans live in relation to employer worksites. Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023. Twelve percent ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Conversations at scale: robust AI-led interviews with simple open-source platform

The advent of large language models (LLMs) provides an opportunity to conduct qualitative interviews at a large scale, with thousands of respondents, creating a bridge between qualitative and quantitative methods. In thi...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Distributional consumer price indices

This paper develops a new public database to estimate inflation heterogeneity across socio-demographic groups in the United States in real time. These distributional CPIs (D-CPIs) are fully consistent with the methodolog...Read more...

POID Working Paper

The Cybernetic Teammate: a field experiment on generative AI reshaping teamwork and expertise

We examine how artificial intelligence transforms the core pillars of collaboration - performance, expertise sharing, and social engagement - through a pre-registered field experiment with 776 professionals at Procter & ...Read more...

POID Working Paper

The new digital divide

We build and analyze new metrics of digital usage that leverage telemetry data collected by Microsoft during operating system updates across forty million Windows devices in U.S. households. These measures of US househol...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Fully remote work expands recruitment and boosts productivity

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked a large and lasting shift to remote work. This column draws on detailed administrative data from a major call centre in Turkiye to show that a permanent shift to fully remote work can expand...Read more...

Blog

LSE Europp:

Cultural exception? Why regulating the book market contradicts conventional wisdom about competition

Fixing retail book prices is a common policy in Europe, but how does preventing competition affect booksellers and buyers? Christos Genakos, Lorien Sabatino and Tommaso Valletti find that when the ability to offer custom...Read more...

Blog

Competition Policy International:

Competition-Friendly Industrial Policy

Industrial policy, essential for addressing market failures, encounters concerns regarding protecting inefficient firms. We advocate for competition-friendly industrial policies, underscoring the complementary relationsh...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Management and firm dynamism

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and improve the performan...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Working from home boosted growth by expanding disability employment

Individuals with a disability have remarkably low employment rates compared to the rest of the population. This column examines whether the rapid rise in the ability to work from home post-pandemic has improved disabilit...Read more...

POID Working Paper

Polarized technologies

We document that inventors patent and cite technologies aligned with the views of their political party. We link inventors to U.S. voter registration data and map politically polarized issues to technologies. Compared to...Read more...

Blog

LSE USA PP:

How emigration shapes the diffusion of new technologies

The diffusion of new technologies across countries is a key driver of productivity growth and economic progress. Yet surprisingly, little is known about how technology moves across borders. Our research provides new evid...Read more...