Guy Michaels and colleagues show how new technologies are polarising the labour market, with the middle-skilled losing out most

When firms have different R&D productivities, it may be welfare increasing to differentiate patent lives across inventions. The reason is that any uniform patent life provides excessive incentives to do R&D to the low productivity firms and insufficient incentives to the high productivity firms....

John Van Reenen sketches the evolution of CEP research on the drivers of productivity growth - and its impact on policies to foster competition.

This paper estimates the impact of road improvements on firm employment and productivity using plant level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured by changes in employment accessibility along the road network. These changes are constructed using data on...

What policies and institutions are needed to sustain long-run growth in the UK? We describe an optimistic story of the UK economy over the past 30 years. From the late 1970s, the UK reversed a century of relative decline in terms of per capita GDP with our main counterparts in the US, France and...

The impact of R&D on growth through spillovers has been a major topic of economic research over the last thirty years. A central problem in the literature is that firm performance is affected by two countervailing "spillovers" : a positive effect from technology (knowledge) spillovers and a...

How and by how much do supervisors enhance worker productivity? Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, supervisor effects are estimated and found to be large. Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper...

GDP per worker fell for the five years after 2008 which is unprecedented in post war UK history. In this paper we argue that “capital shallowing” (i.e. the fall in the capital-labour ratio) could be the main reason for this. This is likely to have occurred due to changes in factor prices: a...

In recent years, the economics of migration literature has shown a substantial growth in papers exploring host country impacts beyond the labour market. Specifically, researchers have begun to shift their attention from labour market and fiscal changes, towards exploring what we might call...

This brief essay provides a selective discussion of how in recent years economists in the neoclassical tradition have addressed the questions whether and how immigration affects native workers’ labour market outcomes. In particular, it discusses: the distinction between the displacement,...