Henry Overman sketches the evolution of CEP research on why prosperity is so unevenly distributed across cities, regions and nations.

All governments are concerned with tackling the problems of areas that experience sustained decline and underperformance. In the UK, several factors have combined to raise profound questions about future government policy in this area. First, it is becoming increasingly clear that the recession...

In this research report IDEAS explores the current euro crisis by looking at the debates preceding the conception of the euro. How can the early days of EU monetary cooperation help us understand today's predicament? And what lessons can we draw from them for the euro? Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol is...

This policy note spells out lessons for rural policy that emerge from recent SERC research. It summarises a SERC policy paper available at http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/publications/download/sercpp008.pdf

Starting with Mirrlees (1971) and Vickrey (1945), the optimal tax literature has studied the design of a personal income tax. The ideal would be to tax earnings ability. Earnings ability is unobservable for tax purposes, however, and past papers have focused instead on designing a tax on labor...

We discuss how standard computable equilibrium models of trade policy can be enriched with selection effects. This is achieved by estimating and simulating a partial equilibrium model that accounts for a number of real world effects of trade liberalisation: richer availability of product...

The DEA gets the balance between copyright enforcement and innovation wrong. The use of peer-to-peer technology should be encouraged to promote innovative applications. Focusing on efforts to suppress the use of technological advances and toprotect out-of-date business models will stifle...