POID Working Papers

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...

Christos Genakos, Tobias Kretschmer and Ambre Nicolle

10 October 2025

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...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart and Jean-Felix Brouillette

7 October 2025

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...

Lelys Dinarte-Diaz, James Gresham, Renata Lemos, Harry A. Patrinos and Rony Rodriguez-Ramirez

7 September 2025

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...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart, Peter J. Klenow and Huiyu Li

29 August 2025

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...

Antonin Bergeaud, Jean-Baptiste Chaniot and Clement Malgouyres

26 August 2025

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...

David Autor and Neil Thompson

2 July 2025

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...

Cevat Giray Aksoy, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Victoria Marino and Cem Ozguzel

13 June 2025

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...

Mert Akan, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Thomas Bowen, Shelby R. Buckman, Steven J. Davis and Hyoseul Kim

10 June 2025

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Mihai Codreanu and Robert S. Fletcher

10 June 2025

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...

Xavier Jaravel

5 June 2025

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...

Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel

5 June 2025

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...

Rahul Dodhia, Tammy Glazer, Shane Greenstein, Allen Kim, Juan Lavista Ferres, Mayana Pereira, Lucia Ronchi Darre, Raffaella Sadun and Prasanna Tambe

2 June 2025

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...

Charles Ayoubi, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Jeff Goldman, Yi Han, Karim Lakhani, Hila Lifshitz, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, Hari Nair, Raffaella Sadun and Stewart Taub

2 June 2025

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...

Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen

12 May 2025

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...

Gaia Dossi and Marta Morando

6 May 2025

POID Working Paper

Creative destruction through innovation bursts

In theories of creative destruction, product innovation is a key driver of aggregate growth. In this paper, we confront the predictions of these theories about product dynamics with empirical patterns in product-level da...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Maarten De Ridder, Danial Lashkari and Davide Rigo

16 April 2025

POID Working Paper

Emissions-adjusted total factor productivity

Traditional estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) measure the output that a bundle of inputs produces. But production comes with emissions that stay in the atmosphere for decades, which means that productivity doe...Read more...

Maarten De Ridder and Lukasz Rachel

1 April 2025

POID Working Paper

Firm dynamics and growth with soft budget constraints

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

18 March 2025

POID Working Paper

Cultural exception? The impact of price regulation on prices and variety in the market for books

Fixed book price (FBP) agreements are a form of resale price maintenance applied to books in various countries. FBP restricts retail price competition with the aim of promoting book production variety. Yet, despite its p...Read more...

Christos Genakos, Mario Pagliero, Lorien Sabatino and Tommaso Valletti

18 March 2025

POID Working Paper

Return innovation: The knowledge spillovers of the British migration to the United States, 1870-1940

This paper documents that out-migration promotes the diffusion of innovation from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. Between 1870 and 1940, nearly four million British immigrants settled in ...Read more...

Davide M. Coluccia and Gaia Dossi

12 February 2025

POID Working Paper

AI-generated production networks: Measurement and applications to global trade

This paper leverages generative AI to build a network structure over 5,000 product nodes, where directed edges represent input-output relationships in production. We layout a two-step 'buildprune' approach using an ensem...Read more...

Bennet Feld, Thiemo Fetzer, Prashant Garg and Peter Lambert

6 February 2025

POID Working Paper

Poaching, raids and managerial compensation

This paper presents a model of employee poaching with asymmetric employer learning. Firms poach managers not only due to their track record but also for their personnel-specific information about workers. In equilibrium,...Read more...

Yi Chen, Fabiano Dal-Ri, Thomas Jungbauer and Daniela Scur

27 January 2025

POID Working Paper

Migration and innovation: The impact of East German investors on West Germany's technological development

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berli...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Max Deter, Maria Greve and Michael Wyrwich

21 January 2025

POID Working Paper

How curvy is the Phillips curve?

Macro data suggests a convex relationship between inflation and economic slack, but identifying causality is challenging. Using micro data from large panel surveys of UK and US firms we show that the response of prices t...Read more...

Lena Anayi, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov

21 January 2025

POID Working Paper

The China shock revisited: Job reallocation and industry switching in US labor markets

Using confidential administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau we revisit how the rise in Chinese import penetration has reshaped U.S. local labor markets. Local labor markets more exposed to the China shock experien...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Kyle Handley, Andre Kurmann and Philip A. Luck

12 January 2025

POID Working Paper

Firm climate investment: A glass half-full

We analyse the importance of climate-related investment using a large economy-wide survey of UK firms. Over half of firms expect climate change to have a positive impact on their investment in the medium term, with aroun...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Prachi Srivastava, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov

12 January 2025

POID Working Paper

The new digital divide

Rahul Dodhia, Tammy Glazer, Shane Greenstein, Allen Kim, Juan Lavista Ferres, Mayana Pereira, Lucia Ronchi Darre, Raffaella Sadun and Prasanna Tambe

6 January 2025

POID Working Paper

The past, present and future of European productivity

European productivity has experienced a marked deceleration since the 1970s, with the productivity gap between the Euro area and the United States widening significantly since 1995, a trend further intensified by the COV...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud

14 October 2024

POID Working Paper

Job displacement, remarriage and marital sorting

We investigate how job displacement affects whom men marry and study implications for structural models of marriage market matching. Leveraging quasi-experimental variation from Danish establishment closures, we show tha...Read more...

Hanno Foerster, Tim Obermeier and Bastian Schulz

1 October 2024

POID Working Paper

The new wave? The role of human capital and STEM skills in technology adoption in the UK

Which types of human capital influence the adoption of advanced technologies? We study the skill biased adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) across two waves in the UK. Specifically, we compare th...Read more...

Mirko Draca, Max Nathan, Viet Nguyen-Tien, Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Anna Rosso and Anna Valero

1 October 2024

POID Working Paper

Brexit and investment

In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union and growth in UK manufacturing investment ground to a halt. This paper uses administrative trade data to investigate the causal relationship between these events. We expl...Read more...

Agnes Norris Keiller

6 August 2024

POID Working Paper

When trade drives markup divergence an application to auto markets

When firms sell in multiple markets, estimates of markups from the demand-side will generally diverge from estimates based on the supply-side (e.g. via production functions). The empirical examination of the importance o...Read more...

Agnes Norris Keiller, Tim Obermeier, Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

30 July 2024

POID Working Paper

Production function estimation using subjective expectations data

Standard methods for estimating production functions in the Olley and Pakes (1996) tradition require assumptions on input choices. We introduce a new method that exploits (increasingly available) data on a firm's expecta...Read more...

Agnes Norris Keiller, John Van Reenen and Aureo de Paula

12 July 2024

POID Working Paper

An Engine of (Pay) Growth?: Productivity and wages in the UK auto industry

When labour market competition is imperfect, positive industry (and firm) productivity shocks can be passed through to workers in the form of higher wages. We document how the UK auto industry, following a period of decl...Read more...

Agnes Norris Keiller, Tim Obermeier, Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

1 July 2024

POID Working Paper

When GenAI increases inequality: Evidence from a university debating competition

This paper evaluates the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on productivity and work inequality. I run a Randomized Controlled Trial in a university debating competition, in which I randomly assign GenA...Read more...

Antonio Roldan

18 June 2024

POID Working Paper

Disaster management

Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, yet little is known about the capacity of firms to withstand such disasters and adapt to their increased frequency. We examine this issue using the latest wave of...Read more...

Agnes Norris Keiller and John Van Reenen

7 June 2024

POID Working Paper

Property rights and innovation dynamism: The role of women inventors

How do stronger property rights for disadvantaged groups affect innovation? I investigate the impact of strengthened property rights for women on U.S. innovation by analyzing the Married Women's Property Acts, which gran...Read more...

Ruveyda Nur Gozen

28 May 2024

POID Working Paper

Do higher-priced hospitals deliver higher-quality care?

Hospitals in the US compete on price and quality. There are fears that because of general idiosyncrasies in the market for health care services, competition between hospitals will not generate efficient prices. These con...Read more...

Zack Cooper, Joseph Doyle, John A. Graves and Jonathan Gruber

15 May 2024

POID Working Paper

Five facts about MPCs: Evidence from a randomised experiment

We present experimental evidence on the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of transitory transfers, distributing prepaid debit cards with different features. The one-month MPC is substantially higher with a card ex...Read more...

Johannes Boehm, Etienne Fize and Xavier Jaravel

9 May 2024

POID Working Paper

Applying AI to rebuild middle class jobs

While the utopian vision of the current Information Age was that computerization would flatten economic hierarchies by democratizing information, the opposite has occurred. Information, it turns out, is merely an input i...Read more...

David Autor

9 May 2024

POID Working Paper

Labour market power: New evidence on non-compete agreements and the effects of M&A in the UK

Monopsony power is an important feature of modern labour markets. We examine its impact on workers. We report the first representative survey of Non-Compete-Agreements (NCA) in the UK and find that about 26% of workers a...Read more...

Julian Alves, Jason Greenberg, Yaxin Guo, Ravija Harjai, Bruno Serra-Lorenzo and John Van Reenen

29 January 2024

POID Working Paper

Help for the Heartland? The employment and electoral effects of the Trump tariffs in the United States

We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other US trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to US impor...Read more...

David Autor, Anne Beck, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson

26 January 2024

POID Working Paper

Political ideology and innovation

We study the role of political ideology for a critical group of economic agents: inventors. We document that, in "politically polarizing" fields, inventors patent innovations aligned with their political beliefs. We cons...Read more...

Gaia Dossi and Marta Morando

19 December 2023

POID Working Paper

Exporting ideas: Knowledge flows from expanding trade in goods

We examine the effect of entry by French firms into a new export market on the dynamics of their patents' citations received from that destination. Applying a difference-in-differences identification strategy with a stag...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timothee Gigout, Matthieu Lequien and Marc J. Melitz

11 December 2023

POID Working Paper

Proximity of firms to scientific production

Following Bergeaud et al. (2022), we construct a new measure of proximity between industrial sectors and public research laboratories. Using this measure, we explore the underlying network of knowledge linkages between s...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud and Arthur Guillouzouic

7 November 2023

POID Working Paper

Labor market power, product market power and the wage structure: A note

A burgeoning literature in labor economics is focused on modelling employer labor market power, generally finding nontrivial estimates of monopsony power. A smaller literature also simultaneously incorporates product mar...Read more...

John Van Reenen

7 November 2023

POID Working Paper

National borders and the conservation of nature

Tropical forests play a central role in slowing climate change and their conservation has become an international priority. The fact that the majority of tropical deforestation is illegal, often involves complicit states...Read more...

Robin Burgess, Francisco Costa and Benjamin Olken

3 November 2023

POID Working Paper

Electricity demand and supply on the global electrification frontier

Falling off-grid solar prices and grid expansion now give many households in developing countries a choice between electricity sources. We experimentally estimate demand over all sources in Bihar, India and find that: (i...Read more...

Robin Burgess, Michael Greenstone, Nicholas Ryan and Anant Sudarshan

3 November 2023

POID Working Paper

Welfare inequality with collective households: A tale of consumption, time use and preference heterogeneity

A common approach to analysing inequality focuses on household income and assumes the absence of intra-household inequality and homogenous equivalence scales. To study the role of these assumptions, I build a model of ho...Read more...

Tim Obermeier

18 October 2023

POID Working Paper

Identifying Network Ties from Panel Data: Theory and an application to tax competition

Social interactions determine many economic behaviors, but information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets. We present results on the identification of social networks from o...Read more...

Imran Rasul, Pedro Souza and Aureo de Paula

18 October 2023

POID Working Paper

Making the invisible hand visible: Managers and the allocation of workers to jobs

Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational fi...Read more...

Virginia Minni

9 October 2023

POID Working Paper

Is Having an Expert "Friend" Enough? An Analysis of Consumer Switching Behavior in Mobile Telephony

We present novel evidence from a large panel of UK consumers who receive personalized reminders from a specialist price-comparison website about the precise amount they could save by switching to their best-suited altern...Read more...

Christos Genakos, Costas Roumanias and Tommaso Valletti

1 August 2023

POID Working Paper

VAT pass-through and competition: Evidence from the Greek Islands

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we investigate how changes i...Read more...

Lydia Dimitrakopoulou, Christos Genakos, Themistoklis Kampouris and Stella Papadokonstantaki

3 July 2023

POID Working Paper

Legal aid in child welfare: Evidence from a randomized trial of Mi Abogado

Children spend years in foster care, and there are concerns that bureaucratic hurdles contribute to unnecessarily long stays. In a novel approach to policy making, the Chilean government randomized the introduction of a ...Read more...

Ryan Cooper, Joseph Doyle and Andres Hojman

3 July 2023

POID Working Paper

The unexpected compression: Competition at work in the low wage labor market

Labor market tightness following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic led to an unexpected compression in the US wage distribution that reflects, in part, an increase in labor market competition. Rapid relative wage growt...Read more...

David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew

3 July 2023

POID Working Paper

The distributional effects of trade: Theory and evidence from the United States

How much do consumption patterns matter for the impact of international trade on inequality? In neoclassical trade models, the effects of trade shocks on consumers' purchasing power are governed by the shares of imports ...Read more...

Kirill Borusyak and Xavier Jaravel

1 June 2023

POID Working Paper

Trading places: Mobility responses of native and foreign-born adults to the China trade shock

Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers following economic shocks helps to facilitate local labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We ex...Read more...

David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson

1 June 2023

POID Working Paper

Does Chinese research hinge on US co-authors? Evidence from the China Initiative

Launched in November 2018 by the Trump administration, the China Initiative made administrative procedures more complicated and funding less accessible for collaborative projects between Chinese and US researchers. In th...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Celine Antonin, Luc Paluskiewicz, David Stromberg, Xueping Sun, Raphael Wargon and Karolina Westin

1 June 2023

POID Working Paper

Evaluating merger effects

This paper proposes a new algorithm with which to identify the potential effect of mergers by comparing the outcomes of interest in areas of overlap for the merging parties vis-a-vis areas of no overlap within a differen...Read more...

Christos Genakos, Andreas Lamprinidis and James Walker

1 June 2023

POID Working Paper

Time savings when working from home

We quantify the commute time savings associated with work from home, drawing on data for 27 countries. The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. We estimate that work from home sa...Read more...

Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls and Pablo Zarate

22 May 2023

POID Working Paper

FDI and superstar spillovers: Evidence from firm-to-firm transactions

Using firm-to-firm transactions, we show that starting to supply a 'superstar' firm (large domestic firms, exporters, and multinationals) boosts productivity by 8% in the medium run. Placebos on starting relationships wi...Read more...

Mary Amiti, Cedric Duprez, Jozef Konings and John Van Reenen

27 April 2023

POID Working Paper

Local and national concentration trends in jobs and sales: The role of structural transformation

National U.S. industrial concentration rose between 1992-2017. Simultaneously, the Herfindahl Index of local (six-digit-NAICS by county) employment concentration fell. This divergence between national and local employmen...Read more...

David Autor, Christina Patterson and John Van Reenen

19 April 2023

POID Working Paper

Dealing with adversity: Religiosity or science? Evidence from the great influenza pandemic

How do societies respond to adversity? After a negative shock, separate strands of research document either an increase in religiosity or a boost in innovation efforts. In this paper, we show that both reactions can occu...Read more...

Enrico Berkes, Davide M. Coluccia, Gaia Dossi and Mara P. Squicciarini

23 March 2023

POID Working Paper

Remote work across jobs, companies and space

The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure and characterize this shift, we examine more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a st...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Stephen Hansen, Peter Lambert, Raffaella Sadun and Bledi Taska

17 March 2023

POID Working Paper

Incorporating innovation in competition policy

This report, conducted by a group of Master of Public Administration (MPA) students at the London School of Economics and Political Science, seeks to inform the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on how it should...Read more...

Bethany Carter, Ignacio Loeser, Maria Jose Lopez, Martin de Dios and Mariana del Rio

12 January 2023

POID Working Paper

Dissecting the sinews of power: International trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal military state, 1689-1823

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of dome...Read more...

Ernesto Dal Bo, Karolina Hutkova, Lukas Leucht and Noam Yuchtman

20 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Market power and innovation in the intangible economy

This paper offers a unified explanation for the slowdown of productivity growth, the decline in business dynamism and the rise of market power. Using a quantitative framework, I show that the rise of intangible inputs - ...Read more...

Maarten de Ridder

20 December 2022

POID Working Paper

The Hitchhiker's guide to markup estimation: Assessing estimates from financial data

Macroeconomic outcomes depend on the distribution of markups across firms and over time, making firm-level markup estimates key for macroeconomic analysis. Methods to obtain these estimates require data on the prices tha...Read more...

Basile Grassi, Giovanni Morzenti and Maarten de Ridder

20 December 2022

POID Working Paper

The world uncertainty index

We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word "uncertainty" in the quarterly Economist Intelligence U...Read more...

Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

The impact of COVID-19 on productivity

We analyse the impact of Covid-19 on productivity using data from an innovative monthly firm survey panel that asks for quantitative impacts of Covid on inputs and outputs. We find total factor productivity (TFP) fell by...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Pawel Smietanka and Gregory Thwaites

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

The shift to remote work lessens wage-growth pressure

The recent shift to remote work raised the amenity value of employment. As compensation adjusts to share the amenity-value gains with employers, wage-growth pressures moderate. We find empirical support for this mechanis...Read more...

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer and Emil Mihaylov

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

How hybrid working from home works out

Hybrid working from home (WFH), whereby employees work a mix of days at home and at work each week, has become dominant for graduate employees in the US. This paper evaluates a randomized control trial on 1612 engineers,...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Firming up price inflation

We use data from a large panel survey of UK firms to analyze the economic drivers of price setting since the start of the Covid pandemic. Inflation responded asymmetrically to movements in demand. This helps to explain w...Read more...

Lena Anayi, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Working from home around the world

The pandemic triggered a large, lasting shift to work from home (WFH). To study this shift, we survey full-time workers who finished primary school in 27 countries as of mid-2021 and early 2022. Our cross country compari...Read more...

Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls and Pablo Zarate

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Long social distancing

More than ten percent of Americans with recent work experience say they will continue social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, and another 45 percent will do so in limited ways. We uncover this Long Social Dis...Read more...

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Managerial and financial barriers during the green transition

We use data on 10,852 firms across 22 emerging markets to analyse how credit constraints and deficient firm management inhibit corporate investment in green technologies. For identification, we exploit quasi-exogenous va...Read more...

Ralph De Haas, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls and Helena Schweiger

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Efficient industrial policy for innovation: standing on the shoulders of hidden giants

Research and development is underprovided whenever it creates knowledge spillovers that drive a wedge between its total and private economic returns. Heterogeneity in the intensity of this market failure across technolog...Read more...

Charlotte Guillard, Ralf Martin, Pierre Mohnen, Catherine Thomas and Dennis Verhoeven

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Knowledge spillovers from clean and emerging technologies in the UK

The UK government has committed to increase R&D support for clean technologies in an effort to meet its net-zero target by 2050. The opportunity cost of such programs crucially depends on the value of knowledge spillover...Read more...

Ralf Martin and Dennis Verhoeven

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

The signaling value of legal form in debt financing

We examine if a startup's legal form choice is used as a signal by credit providers to infer its risk to default on a loan. We propose that choosing a legal form with low minimum capital requirements signals higher defau...Read more...

Felix Bracht, Jeroen Mahieu and Steven Vanhaverbeke

15 December 2022

POID Working Paper

VOG: Using volcanic eruptions to estimate the impact of air pollution on student learning outcomes

This study pairs variation stemming from volcanic eruptions from Kilauea with the census of Hawai'i's public schools student test scores to estimate the impact of particulates and sulphur dioxide on student performance. ...Read more...

Timothy Halliday, Rachel Inafuku, Lester Lusher and Aureo de Paula

6 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Tax simplicity or simplicity of evasion? Evidence from self-employment taxes in France

We use individual panel data and the introduction of simpler tax regimes for the self employed in France to assess the extent to which individualsâ€™ shift towards the simpler tax regimes is driven by tax simplicity and ...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Maxime Gravoueille, Matthieu Lequien and Stefanie Stantcheva

5 May 2023

POID Working Paper

New frontiers: The origins and content of new work, 1940-2018

We address three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories ('new work') in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive cont...Read more...

David Autor, Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons and Bryan Seegmiller

6 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Organizational capacity and profit shifting

Good organizational capacity drives productivity and potential taxable profits but may also enable multinationals (MNEs) to more efficiently re-allocate profits across tax jurisdictions, lowering actual taxable profits. ...Read more...

Katarzyna Bilicka and Daniela Scur

6 December 2022

POID Working Paper

Opposing firm-level responses to the China shock: output competition versus input supply

We decompose the "China shock" into two components that induce different adjustments for firms exposed to Chinese exports: an output shock affecting firms selling goods that compete with similar imported Chinese goods, a...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Matthieu Lequien, Marc J. Melitz and Thomas Zuber

30 November 2022

POID Working Paper

Are trade wars class wars? The importance of trade-induced horizontal inequality

What is the nature of the distributional effects of trade? This paper demonstrates conceptually and empirically the importance of "trade-induced horizontal inequality," i.e., inequality brought about by trade shocks that...Read more...

Kirill Borusyak and Xavier Jaravel

30 November 2022

POID Working Paper

Measuring growth in consumer welfare with income-dependent preferences

How should we measure changes in consumer welfare given observed data on prices and expenditures? This paper proposes a nonparametric approach that holds under arbitrary preferences that may depend on observable consumer...Read more...

Xavier Jaravel and Danial Lashkari

30 November 2022

POID Working Paper

Modern manufacturing capital, labor demand, and product market dynamics: evidence from France

We use comprehensive micro data in the French manufacturing sector between 1995 and 2017 to document the effects of a fall in the cost of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation technolog...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Celine Antonin, Simon Bunel and Xavier Jaravel

28 November 2022

POID Working Paper

Productive robots and industrial employment: the role of national innovation systems

In a model with robots, and automatable and non-automatable human tasks, we examine robot-labour substitutions and show how they are influenced by a country's 'innovation system'. Substitution depends on demand and produ...Read more...

Chrystalla Kapetaniou and Christopher A. Pissarides

28 November 2022

POID Working Paper

Responsible sourcing? Theory and evidence from Costa Rica

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) increasingly impose 'Responsible Sourcing' (RS) standards on their suppliers worldwide, including requirements on worker compensation, benefits and working conditions. Are these policies ...Read more...

Alonso Alfaro-Urena, Benjamin Faber, Cecile Gaubert, Isabela Manelici and Jose P Vasquez

16 November 2022

POID Working Paper

From public labs to private firms: magnitude and channels of R&D spillovers

Introducing a new measure of scientific proximity between private firms and public research groups and exploiting a multi-billion euro financing program of academic clusters in France, we provide causal evidence of spill...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Arthur Guillouzouic, Emeric Henry and Clement Malgouyres

26 October 2022

POID Working Paper

Patents that match your standards: firm-level evidence on competition and innovation

When a technology becomes the new standard, the firms that are leaders in producing this technology have a competitive advantage. Matching the semantic content of patents to standards and exploiting the exogenous timing ...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Julia Schmidt and Riccardo Zago

24 October 2022

POID Working Paper

The rise of China's technological power: the perspective from frontier technologies

We use patent data to study the contribution of the US, Europe, China and Japan to frontier technology using automated patent landscaping. We find that China's contribution to frontier technology has become quantitativel...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise

14 October 2022

POID Working Paper

Acquisitions, management and efficiency in Rwanda's coffee industry

Well-functioning markets allocate assets to owners that improve firms' management and performance. We study the effects of ownership changes on coffee mills in Rwanda - an industry in which managing relationships with fa...Read more...

Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

21 July 2022

POID Working Paper

Market size, markups and international price dispersion in the cement industry

Prices for several intermediate inputs, including cement, are higher in developing economies - particularly in Africa. Combining data from the International Comparison Program with a global directory of cement plants we ...Read more...

Fabrizio Leone, Rocco Macchiavello and Tristan Reed

19 July 2022

POID Working Paper

Social push and the direction of innovation

Innovators are intrinsically-motivated individuals who use ideas to create new goods and services. This raises the possibility that their social backgrounds may affect the direction of their innovative activity. Consiste...Read more...

Elias Einiö, Josh Feng and Xavier Jaravel

13 July 2022

POID Working Paper

Nonparametric measurement of long-run growth in consumer welfare

How should we measure long-run changes in consumer welfare? This paper proposes a nonparametric approach that is valid under arbitrary preferences that depend on observable consumer characteristics, e.g. when expenditure...Read more...

Xavier Jaravel and Danial Lashkari

12 July 2022

POID Working Paper

Political adverse selection

We study how the politicization of policies designed to correct market failures can undermine their effectiveness. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was among the most politically divisive expansions o...Read more...

Leonardo Bursztyn, Jonathan Kolstad, Aakaash Rao, Pietro Tebaldi and Noam Yuchtman

12 July 2022

POID Working Paper

A new dataset to study a century of innovation in Europe and the US

Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper,...Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise

28 April 2022

POID Working Paper

Pay, productivity and management

Using confidential Census matched employer-employee earnings data we find that employees at more productive firms, and firms with more structured management practices, have substantially higher pay, both on average and a...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Scott W. Ohlmacher, Cristina J. Tello-Trillo and Melanie Wallskog

4 April 2022

POID Working Paper

The world uncertainty index

Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri

31 March 2022

POID Working Paper

The anatomy of a hospital system merger: the patient did not respond well to treatment

Despite the continuing US hospital merger wave, it remains unclear how mergers change, or fail to change, hospital behavior and performance. We open the "black box" of hospital practices through a mega-merger between two...Read more...

Martin Gaynor, Adam Sacarny, Raffaella Sadun, Chad Syverson and Shruthi Venkatesh

31 March 2022

POID Working Paper

How does working from home during COVID-19 affect what managers do? Evidence from time-use studies

We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on ...Read more...

Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer and Thomaz Teodorovicz

30 March 2022

POID Working Paper

Multitasking while driving: a time use study of commuting knowledge workers to access current and future uses

Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To ach...Read more...

Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer and Thomaz Teodorovicz

30 March 2022

POID Working Paper

Firms and inequality

In the last few decades, dramatic changes have been documented in the US business landscape. These include rising productivity and pay dispersion between firms, higher aggregate markups (of price over variable costs), gr...Read more...

Jan De Loecker, Tim Obermeier and John Van Reenen

9 March 2022

POID Working Paper

Do management practices matter in further education?

Further Education colleges are a key way in which 16-19 year olds acquire skills in the UK (much like US Community Colleges), especially those from low income backgrounds. Yet, little is known about what could improve pe...Read more...

Sandra McNally, Luis Schmidt and Anna Valero

8 March 2022

POID Working Paper

A policy toolkit to increase research and innovation in the European Union

What research and innovation (R&I) policies should Europe adopt? The world faces a challenge to rebuild after the pandemic, but also faces the same structural slowdown of productivity growth that occurred in the decades ...Read more...

Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

25 February 2022

POID Working Paper

Management and misallocation in Mexico

Developing countries exhibit a substantial productivity gap with the US. Differences in management practices are often cited as a crucial contributing factor. Through the implementation of the first comprehensive managem...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Leonardo Iacovone, Mariana Pereira-Lopez and John Van Reenen

25 January 2022

POID Working Paper

Do well managed firms make better forecasts?

We link new forecast and management data on over 20,000 firms to data on productivity in manufacturing and services. The panel survey was administered in the UK in July 2017 and November 2020, coinciding with two periods...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Takafumi Kawakubo, Charlotte Meng, Paul Mizen, Rebecca Riley, Tatsuro Senga and John Van Reenen

5 January 2022

POID Working Paper

Product market competition, creative destruction and innovation

We examine the economic analysis of the relationship between innovation and product market competition. First, we give a brief tour of the intellectual history of the area. Second, we examine how the Aghion-Howitt framew...Read more...

Rachel Griffith and John Van Reenen

29 November 2021

POID Working Paper

Have productivity and pay decoupled in the UK?

In the long-run at the macro level, the real pay of workers tends to follow labour productivity. In recent years, however, there have been concerns that this relationship has broken down and that pay has become "decouple...Read more...

Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen

1 November 2021

POID Working Paper

AI-tocracy

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the ...Read more...

Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman

2 November 2021

POID Working Paper

Organizational capacity and profit shifting

This paper analyses the effect of a firm's organizational capacity on the reported profitability of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Better organizational practices improve productivity and the potential taxable profits...Read more...

Katarzyna Bilicka and Daniela Scur

7 September 2021

POID Working Paper

The impact of healthcare IT on clinical quality, productivity and workers

Adoption of health information and communication technologies ('HICT') has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivit...Read more...

Ari Bronsoler, Joseph Doyle and John Van Reenen

2 September 2021

POID Working Paper

Internet access and its implications for productivity, inequality and resilience

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet...Read more...

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis

2 September 2021

POID Working Paper

The diffusion of disruptive technologies

We identify novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls. Our approach enables us to identify and document the diffusion of 29 disruptive technologies across firms and labor mark...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Tarek Alexander Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Josh Lerner and Ahmed Tahoun

1 September 2021

POID Working Paper

The demand for executive skills

We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into...Read more...

Joe Fuller, Stephen Hansen, Tejas Ramdas and Raffaella Sadun

1 September 2021

POID Working Paper

Communication within firms: evidence from CEO turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level measures derived from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms to study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover le...Read more...

Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

31 August 2021

POID Working Paper

The donut effect of Covid-19 on cities

Using data from the US Postal Service and Zillow, we quantify the effect of Covid-19 on migration patterns and real estate markets within and across US cities. We find two key results. First, within large US cities, hous...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom and Arjun Ramani

10 August 2021

POID Working Paper

This time is not so different: income dynamics during the Covid-19 recession

We use a UK employer-employee administrative earnings dataset to investigate the response of earnings and hours to business cycles. Exploiting our long panel of data from 1975 to 2020 we find wide heterogeneity in the ex...Read more...

Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom and Jack Blundell

10 August 2021

POID Working Paper

Why working from home will stick

COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home (WFH). We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays w...Read more...

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis

9 August 2021

POID Working Paper

What triggers stock market jumps?

We examine next-day newspaper accounts of large daily jumps in 16 national stock markets to assess their proximate cause, clarity as to cause, and the geographic source of the market-moving news. Our sample of 6,200 mark...Read more...

Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis and Marco Sammon

6 August 2021

POID Working Paper

The impact of Covid-19 on US firms

We use survey data on an opt-in panel of around 2,500 US small businesses to assess the impact of COVID-19. We find a significant negative sales impact that peaked in Quarter 2 of 2020, with an average loss of 29% in sal...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Robert S. Fletcher and Ethan Yeh

6 August 2021

POID Working Paper

Innovation, growth and the transition to net-zero emissions

The climate crisis and the global economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis occur against a background of slowing growth and widening inequalities, which together imply an urgent need for a new environmentally sustainable a...Read more...

Nicholas Stern and Anna Valero

1 June 2021

POID Working Paper

Education and management practices

The empirical management literature has found that the education of both managers and the workforce more generally appears to be an important driver of better management practices. This article sets out how such relation...Read more...

Anna Valero

12 May 2021

POID Working Paper

Education and economic growth

This paper summarises the literature that has linked education and economic growth. It begins with an overview of the key concepts in neoclassical and endogenous growth models, and discussion on how these have been teste...Read more...

Anna Valero

28 April 2021

POID Working Paper

Innovation and human capital policy

If innovation is to be subsidized, a natural place to start is to increase the quantity and quality of human capital. Innovation, after all, begins with people. Simply stimulating the "demand side" through R&D subsidies ...Read more...

John Van Reenen

20 April 2021

POID Working Paper

Opening up military innovation: Causal effects of reforms to U.S. defense research

For governments procuring innovation, one choice is whether to specify desired products (a "Conventional" approach) or allow firms to suggest ideas (an "Open" approach). Using a U.S. Air Force R&D grant program, where Op...Read more...

Sabrina T. Howell, Jason Rathje, John Van Reenen and Jun Wong

13 April 2021

POID Working Paper

Data-intensive innovation and the State: evidence from AI firms in China

Artificial intelligence (AI) innovation is data-intensive. States have historically collected large amounts of data, which is now being used by AI firms. Gathering comprehensive information on firms and government procur...Read more...

Martin Beraja, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman

31 March 2021

POID Working Paper

World Management Survey at 18: lessons and the way forward

Understanding how differences in management "best practices" affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics and public policy. The...Read more...

Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur and John Van Reenen

28 February 2021

POID Working Paper

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data where there is a sharp ...Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud and John Van Reenen

29 January 2021