Centre for Economic Policy Research

Evidence from Spain's 2007 long-term care reform shows that access to cash subsidies and publicly funded home help raised life satisfaction, reduced loneliness, and increased survival, at a cost per quality-adjusted life year well below the thresholds applied to health programmes.

Agreements between manufacturers and retailers can affect competition across brands and stores through downstream retail pricing and changes in upstream wholesale contracting, with the wholesale channel generating the larger consumer welfare loss.

Belgian data show that the sales volumes of suppliers grow faster when there is a higher proportion of business w/ customers backed by private equity. This advantage is lost during downturns, as investors push for cost savings. Buyouts can also crowd out competitors that rely on the same suppliers.

China's retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US also induced evasion, especially through the misreporting of US-origin goods as originating from other third countries. 35% of the tariff-induced reduction in recorded imports is attributed to underreporting.

CEPR Discussion Papers Week Ending 25/10/2026 - https://ow.ly/ZQrn5100Uj5

The shale revolution has transformed how the US economy responds to oil shocks. As the country shifted from a major petroleum importer to a net exporter, adverse oil supply news has become considerably less contractionary and can even support activity.

Following the post-pandemic inflation surge, nominal interest rates increased significantly in the US & euro area, though economic activity & labour markets remained resilient. This column finds evidence that implies a larger increase in the natural rate of interest than standard approaches suggest.

Liran Einav & Amy Finkelstein explore how improvements in elderly health and life expectancy have affected the relative finances of Social Security and Medicare. Medicare spending per elderly individual has grown much slower than expected lifetime Social Security spending. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Centre-right parties should not shift further to the right to capture far-right voters. Evidence from the 2025 German federal election shows that the CDU shifting further to the right to capture AfD voters would not only have left the CDU worse off, but politics would be pulled further to the right.

📢 Final reminder: #CallForPapers - CEPR-IO Virtual Gathering PhD candidates at European institutions are invited to submit their job market paper between 26 and 30 October to present at the next gathering. https://ow.ly/I1kS50ZRkzW Organisers: Daniel Ershov João Montez, & Jiekai Zhang #EconSky

At a virtual event hosted by @cepr.org, DIW researcher @tomasoduso.bsky.social discussed European competition policy and its interlinkages with the competitiveness mandate alongside Anthony Whelan (DG Competition, @ec.europa.eu) and @cristinacaffarra.bsky.social (@ucl.ac.uk) ⬇️

Rearm at home or fund #Ukraine? Many European leaders see a painful trade-off. It isn't one. In a new report, Torbjörn Becker & I show it's a win-win: #Europe buys security cheaper & faster, Ukraine's idle factories get to work, & Russia's frozen assets can help pay. Link: tinyurl.com/56mx7xf8

Sumit Agarwal, Peiyi Jin, Eswar Prasad, & Daniel Rabetti present evidence of sharp, short-lived surges of anonymous crypto activity on tax-haven exchanges in the month aid disbursements arrive, implying leakage of two to six cents per aid dollar. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

J Böken, M Draca, N Mastrorocco, & A Ornaghi examine the relationship between Twitter likes and campaign contributions for US Members of Congress in 2019-2020. Returns are substantial only when politicians go viral, and a handful of stars capture a disproportionate amount of gains.

Martin Sandbu highlights two CEPR #Europe2050 columns in his new @financialtimes.com column. One by @agnesbq.bsky.social on Europe's payment system, and the other by Lucrezia Reichlin on the modernisation of European finance. Find them both here: cepr.org/europe-2050-...

📢 #CallForPapers - 2nd FYI Workshop on Publishing in Top Macro & Finance Journals 15-16 March 2027 | Kiel-CEPR Research Hub, Berlin Submission Deadline: 18 December 2026 (23:59 GMT) Event partners: Leipzig University, @kiel.institute @bundesbank.de @iwh-halle.bsky.social cepr.org/events/2nd-f...

A Lemmer, A Mahle, & K Wendorff propose a way to bridge the gap between EU fiscal rules and EU debt. Additional EU borrowing would be matched by a corresponding reduction in national borrowing, making the fiscal burden of EU debt visible in national statistics. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

V Melo, D Neumark, L Sigaud, & G Wagner examine the impact of an increase in the minimum wage in California for workers at large & small fast-food chains. For smaller chains, employment, the number of establishments, and openings fell, while closures rose. The largest chains remained unchanged.

For the 2nd consecutive year, VoxTalks Economics has been recognised by the Signal Awards. ‘Did the Sewing Machine Liberate Women?’, hosted by Tim Phillips Talk Normal with CEPR Research Fellow Philipp Ager, won Silver in the Conversation Starter category. https://ow.ly/283L50ZZnQZ

The CEPR Virtual Industrial Organisation Seminar #VIOS Series continues on 28 October at 15:00 CET featuring Michael Rubens (Boston College and CEPR) presenting: 'Monopsony and Backloaded Compensation' Discussant: Allan Collard-Wexler @duke-university.bsky.social Register: ow.ly/qLG350ZQsM2

National security concerns have led a growing number of countries to screen foreign investment in more sectors. Screening reduces the number of cross-border acquisitions by 11-18% but leaves the total value of inward investment unchanged. By: Feicheng Wang, Vera Eichenauer cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Suzanne Vissers & Henrik Zaunbrecher argue that across-the-board reductions in capital requirements are not the solution to Europe's competitiveness issues. Reforms should focus on streamlining reporting and completing the Banking Union. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

📢 #CallForPapers - 2027 WEFIDEV - RFS - CEPR Conference 📆6-8 May 2027 |📍 Milan, Italy ⌛Deadline: 15 November 2026 Theoretical and empirical submissions on financial markets in low and middle-income countries are invited. ow.ly/nwon50ZQ2Ty

Comparing investors in emerging market local-currency sovereign bond markets by whether they are benchmarked to J.P. Morgan's main local-currency government bond index shows that benchmarked investors have increased their share of foreign holdings more than twofold over 2010–2025.

Patent data before and after acquisitions by 8 big tech giants show that, on average, the ‘Big Eight’ firms appear to invest in the acquired technology rather than kill it. Acquired inventions become more influential, more widely cited, and more embedded in follow-on innovation.

This column explores remote work’s impacts on UK employment & other outcomes such as commute times, hours worked, & wages. A 1 pp increase in working from home raises full-time employment of people w/ a physical disability by ~0.9% & raises full-time employment of workers aged 50-64 by ~0.4%.

For his contribution to CEPR's #Europe2050 initiative, Eric Hazan argues that Europe's challenge is to take back control of technological progress. He presents the goal as "controlled interdependence" with a European presence across every layer of the AI value chain. cepr.org/publications...

CEPR Discussion Papers Week Ending 18/10/2026 - https://ow.ly/3Y4S50ZYQVA

📆 20 October @ 16:00 CEST The Fall 2026 VDEV/CEPR/BREAD seminars continue with Francesco Amodio presenting "Beefing Up the Service Sector: Commodity Export Booms and Production Network Spillovers". Moderator: Nicolás de Roux ow.ly/Qv9v50YXubG

Thomas Lustenberger and Enzo Rossi find that during forward guidance episodes public information proves less accurate than private information. Despite this inaccuracy, forecasters over-rely on public information. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

This column reports two leading models writing an econometric script, as a chatbot that never runs it and as an agent that runs and revises it. Letting the models run their code raises the share of correct results from 79% to 97% and makes the prompt and the software matter far less.

Drawing on new cross-country evidence, Luiz de Mello & Joao Tovar Jalles show that fiscal consolidations launched in high-debt environments are markedly more contractionary, and in more than half of the episodes in the sample the debt ratio was still higher three years after consolidation.

Using data on financial policies in 88 democracies between 1973 and 2015, this column shows that leaders facing a binding term limit roll back financial liberalisation roughly three times more than leaders who can run again – but only in the wake of a financial crisis.

C Barreto, R Grundke, & Z Krill show that workers in high-carbon-intensity sectors face larger earnings & wage losses than workers displaced in other sectors. The nature of carbon-intensive jobs means fewer options for displaced workers w/ similar skill requirements & pay. https://ow.ly/LPKw50ZYl2F

Francesco Bianchi, Renato Faccini, @leonardo-melosi.bsky.social and @nilswehrhoefer.bsky.social argue in their VoxEU column and CEPR Discussion Paper that trust in the ECB plays a key role in firms' inflation expectations as pessimistic debt projections abound. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

A new CEPR #PolicyInsight by @wederdim.bsky.social, Toshihiro Okubo, & Hillel Rapoport studies Switzerland and Japan to show that it is not that anti-immigration attitudes have suddenly intensified, but that their political salience has increased. cepr.org/publications...

On Oct 23-24, CEPR & Tsinghua University present a conference on global imbalances. Hosted at Tsinghua SEM, there will be a high-level, closed-door policy session featuring keynotes and policy panels on day one and then a 2nd day of paper presentations. View the programme: https://ow.ly/q7eM50ZYoQ8

@adrienbilal.bsky.social, @dkaenzig.bsky.social, & K Lisiecki broaden the conversation on climate change and mortality to look at fluctuations in global temperature and the effects on economic activity and living standards, both of which have an indirect effect on mortality. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

David Lagakos & @todd-schoellman.bsky.social show that inputs account for a much higher share of the gap in GDP per worker between developing and developed countries than previously thought - between 55-70%, as opposed to 30% before. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

While tokenisation offers considerable promise, the transition to a tokenised world of finance will not be frictionless. The coexistence of on-chain systems with traditional off-chain infrastructures could create new challenges for market functioning.