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Discussion papers

Findings from CEP's academic research are first published in our open-access discussion paper series.

Latest Discussion papers

CEP discussion paper
Adoption, incidence and welfare impacts of interest-free loans: evidence from solar PV

Steep declines in solar PV costs raises questions about whether, and how, to continue support. We leverage administrative microdata on the near-universe of UK domestic PV and a matched difference-in-differences design ex...Read more...

Leanne Cass, Misato Sato and Aurelien Saussay

12 December 2025

CEP discussion paper
Minority bureaucrats' networks and career progression: evidence from the Chinese maritime customs service

Do minorities benefit from social networks? In this paper, we study this question using the historical example of China's first modern bureaucratic organization, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Drawing on newly dig...Read more...

Yan Hu and Stephan Maurer

3 December 2025

CEP discussion paper
Mind the lag: Using assessed and list prices as proxies for housing market values

Property transaction prices are widely regarded as the best measure of property value, but are sometimes unavailable. Using data from the Netherlands and New York, we analyze whether list prices and assessed values are r...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Hans R. A. Koster and Tu Giang Vu

27 November 2025

CEP discussion paper
Accommodating emerging giants in the global economy

How has aggregate income and welfare in the United States been affected by globalization and rapid productivity growth in emerging economies? We use the class of constant elasticity trade models to provide quantitative e...Read more...

Zhuokai Huang, Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding

27 November 2025

CEP discussion paper
The Economics of climate innovation: technology, climate policy, and the clean energy transition

We examine the economics of climate innovation and its role in the clean technology transition. It outlines the incentives, market failures, and policy levers that shape the development and diffusion of clean technologie...Read more...

Eugenie Dugoua and Jacob Moscona

24 November 2025

CEP discussion paper
When do employers share? Rent sharing, monopsony and minimum wages

When firm productivity or product demand rises, workers typically share in the gains through higher wages or expanded employment. We show that for firms under monopsony with a binding minimum wage, this link from firm ga...Read more...

Ihsaan Bassier and Joshua Budlender

13 November 2025

CEP discussion paper
Cleaner energy, higher risk? Firm-level exposure to critical minerals

To what extent has the rise of clean energy technologies created new vulnerabilities in global supply chains? In this paper, I study the role of a new type of 'input uncertainty' associated with critical minerals that un...Read more...

Viet Nguyen-Tien

3 November 2025

CEP discussion paper
A familiar offence: how households shape juvenile reoffending

In this paper we focus on how the criminal history of a household affects juvenile reoffending. Using detailed administrative data from Greater Manchester Police for 2007-2018, we construct a matched sample of 15,548 juv...Read more...

Tobias Auer and Tom Kirchmaier

3 November 2025

CEP discussion paper
Anatomy of automation: CNC machines and industrial robots in UK manufacturing, 2005-2023

Using a novel proprietary survey of UK manufacturing sites, we study the impact on employment of arguably the two most important industrial automation technologies of the past fifty years: computer numerical control (CNC...Read more...

Aniket Baksy, Daniel Chandler and Peter Lambert

24 October 2025

CEP discussion paper
Better stealing than dealing: how do felony theft thresholds impact crime?

From 2005 to 2019, forty US states raised the dollar value threshold delineating misdemeanor and felony theft, reducing the expected punishment for a subset of property crimes. Using an event study framework, we observe ...Read more...

Stephen B. Billings, Michael D. Makowsky, Kevin Schnepel and Adam Soliman

24 October 2025

CEP discussion paper
Personnel policy in public sector organizations: evidence from England's academy schools

Many governments are increasingly decentralizing the governance of public sector organizations, by granting more autonomy to their managers. At the same time, public sector managers often cannot use key personnel practic...Read more...

Emma Duchini, Victor Lavy, Stephen Machin and Shqiponja Telhaj

23 October 2025

CEP discussion paper
Equilibrium trade regimes: power- vs. rules-based

Members of the World Trade Organization are increasingly disregarding its rules, raising concerns about the future of the multilateral trading system. To analyze the sustainability of the rules-based trade regime, we dev...Read more...

Cecilia Carvalho, Daniel Monte and Emanuel Ornelas

22 October 2025

CEP discussion paper
Nice work if you can get it? The distribution of employment and earnings during the early years of the clean energy transition

The transition to clean energy represents a fundamental and important shift in economic activity. We present new facts about workers in clean and legacy energy sectors between 2005 and 2019 using linked, administrative e...Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Eva Lyubich and John Voorheis

9 October 2025

CEP discussion paper
A new model of parental time investments: A paradigm shift for addressing gender inequality in the labor market

This paper introduces a new framework for understanding the persistence of the motherhood penalty by emphasizing the role of on-call care. Using a pseudo-panel event study based on the 2003-2022 American Time Use Survey ...Read more...

Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz, Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal, Sveva Manfredi and Almudena Sevilla

19 September 2025

CEP discussion paper
Segregation, spillovers and the locus of racial change

We use a discrete choice framework to provide the first nesting of Thomas C. Schelling's canonical models of racial segregation amenable to empirical examination. Using U.S. Census data from 1970-2000, we demonstrate a c...Read more...

Donald R. Davis, Matthew Easton and Stephan Thies

16 September 2025

CEP discussion paper
Citizen training and the urban waste footprint

Diverting waste away from and zero waste to landfills are sustainability policy aims of local and national governments around the world, particularly in countries with large waste footprints from rapid consumption growth...Read more...

Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin

10 September 2025

CEP discussion paper
The social spillovers of homeownership: evidence from institutional investors

We provide novel evidence on the social spillovers of homeownership by exploiting the recent rise of institutional investors purchasing single-family homes and converting them into permanent rentals. Using a granular dif...Read more...

Stephen B. Billings and Adam Soliman

8 September 2025

CEP discussion paper
Police effectiveness, geographic specialization, police organization

This paper provides causal evidence that geographic specialization can significantly enhance police effectiveness. Using rich administrative and survey data from Chile, we examine a major reform that subdivided police op...Read more...

Andrés Barrios Fernández, Jorge Garcia-Hombrados and Daniel Perez-Parra

3 September 2025

CEP discussion paper
Following in the family footsteps: Incidence and returns of occupational persistence

Children often follow their parents into the same occupations. However, evidence on the economic returns of occupational persistence is scarce and understanding these outcomes and their unequal prevalence across social s...Read more...

Maria Ventura

3 September 2025

CEP discussion paper
Pipeline vs. choice: the global gender gap in STEM applications

Women account for only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. We use administrative microdata from centralized university admissions in ten systems to deliver the first cross-national decomposition...Read more...

Isaac Ahimbisibwe, Adam Altjmed, Gregory Artemov, Andrés Barrios Fernández, Aspasia Bizopoulou, Martti Kaila, Jin-Tan Liu, Rigissa Megalokonomou, Jose Montalban, Christopher Neilson, Sebastian Otero, Jintao Sun and Xiaoyang Ye

27 August 2025

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