We distinguish between ideational and interest-based appeals to voters on the supply side of politics, and integrate the Keynes-Hayek perspective on the importance of ideas with the Stigler-Becker approach emphasizing vested interests. In our model, political entrepreneurs discover identity and...

Macro data suggests a convex relationship between inflation and economic slack, but identifying causality is challenging. Using micro data from large panel surveys of UK and US firms we show that the response of prices to demand shocks is also convex at the firm level. We obtain similar results...

We analyse the importance of climate-related investment using a large economy-wide survey of UK firms. Over half of firms expect climate change to have a positive impact on their investment in the medium term, with around a quarter expecting a large impact of over 10%. Around two-thirds of these...

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...

We distinguish between three sets of rights - property rights, political rights, and civil rights - and provide a taxonomy of political regimes. The distinctive nature of liberal democracy is that it protects civil rights (equality before the law for minorities) in addition to the other two....

We consider a model of policy choice in which appropriate policies depend on a country's own circumstances, but the presence of a successful leader generates an informational externality and results in too little 'policy experimentation.' Corrupt governments are reined in while honest...

We develop a conceptual framework to highlight the role of ideas as a catalyst for policy and institutional change. We make an explicit distinction between ideas and vested interests and show how they feed into each other. In doing so the paper integrates the Keynes-Hayek perspective on the...

This paper combines representative worker-level data that cover time-varying job-level task characteristics of an economy over a long time span with sector-level bilateral trade data for merchandize and services. We carefully create longitudinally consistent workplace characteristics from the...