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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...
Ralf Martin, Arjun Shah, Anna Valero and Dennis Verhoeven
17 March 2026
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...
Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Steven J. Davis, Kevin M. Foster, Aaron Jalca, Brent H. Meyer, Paul Mizen, Michael A. Navarrete, Pawel Smietanka, Gregory Thwaites, Ben Zhe Wang and Ivan Yotzov
23 February 2026
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...
Ignacio Banares-Sanchez, Robin Burgess, David Laszlo, Pol Simpson, John Van Reenen and Yifan Wang
16 February 2026
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...
Christos Genakos and Themistoklis Kampouris
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...
Antonin Bergeaud, Ruveyda Nur Gozen and John Van Reenen
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...
David Autor and B.N. Kausik
9 February 2026
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...
David Autor, Andrew Caplin, Daniel J. Martin and Philip Marx
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...
Stephen Bond, Agnes Norris Keiller, Tim Obermeier, John Van Reenen and Aureo de Paula
4 February 2026
We present new evidence on how firms set prices using direct questions from a large, economywide survey of UK firms. Since 2023, 54% of firms report setting prices in a state-dependent manner, as opposed to changing pric...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Craig Menzies, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov
This paper examines the impact of the UK's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Pawel Smietanka and Gregory Thwaites
23 January 2026
Conflicts between management and workers are common in newly industrializing countries. Combining ethnographic, survey and administrative records from a Bangladeshi sweater factory, we study how workers responded when ma...Read more...
Robert Akerlof, Anik Ashraf, Rocco Macchiavello and Atonu Rabbani
19 January 2026
Do the returns to quality upgrading pass through supply chains to primary producers? We explore this question in the context of Colombia's coffee sector, in which market outcomes depend on interactions between farmers, e...Read more...
Patrick Farrell, Rocco Macchiavello, Josepa Miquel-Florensa, Eric Verhoogen and Nicolas de Roux
Women remain disadvantaged in promotion to managerial positions. We conduct a field experiment with 24 large garment factories in Bangladesh to test for inefficient representation of women among line supervisors. We iden...Read more...
Rocco Macchiavello, Andreas Menzel, Atonu Rabbani and Christopher Woodruff
This paper studies the effects of the NSF Science Development Program on universities and local innovation, combining historical data from scientific publications, doctoral dissertations, and patents. Introduced in 1965,...Read more...
Grabriele Cristelli
14 January 2026
When firms sell in multiple markets, demand-side markup estimates from a single market need not align with supply-side estimates derived from production data that aggregate across markets. Empirical analysis of this dive...Read more...
Agnes Norris Keiller, Tim Obermeier, Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen
6 January 2026
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
We link U.S. patent and inventor records to individual voter register files and map politically polarized policy issues to related technologies. Compared to Republicans, Democrats are one-third more likely to patent tech...Read more...
Gaia Dossi and Marta Morando
6 May 2025
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
6 January 2025
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
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
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
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
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...
30 July 2024
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
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...
1 July 2024
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
19 December 2023
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
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
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
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...
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...
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
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
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
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
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
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
We use individual panel data and the introduction of simpler tax regimes for the self employed in France to assess the extent to which individuals’ 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
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
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
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
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...
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
12 July 2022
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
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...
28 April 2022
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
31 March 2022
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
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
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...
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
1 November 2021
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
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...
7 September 2021
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
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...
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
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
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
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
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
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...
9 August 2021
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
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
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
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
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...
28 April 2021
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...
20 April 2021
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
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
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
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