We use a major new survey of UK firms, the Decision Maker Panel, to assess the impact of the June 2016 Brexit referendum. We identify three key results. First, the UK's decision to leave the EU has generated a large, broad and long-lasting increase in uncertainty. Second, anticipation of Brexit...

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the US and UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic policy uncertainty, twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about future business growth, and...

This paper explores the role of knowledge flows and productivity growth by linking direct survey data on knowledge flows to firm-level data on TFP growth. Our data measure the information flows often considered important, especially by policy-makers, such as from within the firm and from...

Firms that export or, even more so, are part of a multinational enterprise tend to exhibit higher productivity than their purely domestic counterparts. To better understand this correlation, we incorporate the perspective of industrial organization that one of the main drivers of differences in...

Are there productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms, and, if so, how much should host countries be willing to pay to attract FDI? To examine these questions we use a plant-level panel covering U.K. manufacturing from 1973 through 1992. Across a wide range of specifications, we estimate...

This paper examines whether the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (sbtc) explains changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. First, using a two-factor, two-sector, two-country model we demonstrate that in many cases it is the sector bias of sbtc that determines sbtc's...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to...

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 why inflation did not fall much during the negative initial pandemic demand...

We introduce a new measure of own-price inflation uncertainty using firm-level data from a large and representative survey of UK businesses. Inflation uncertainty increased significantly from the start of 2021 and reached a peak in the second half of 2022, even as a similar measure of sales...

This paper analyses the response of firms to monthly CPI inflation releases using high-frequency data from a large economy-wide business survey. CPI inflation perceptions respond very quickly, in a matter of hours after the release. We also find that firms' expected own-price growth has a strong...