The UK is facing not one but two housing crises. The first is a short-term fall in prices and construction whcih is both driven by and driving the recession. The second and more profound is the overall shortage of housing and the problems of affordability that this generates.

There are large variations in economic performance across UK cities and on some measures, they have widened since the global financial crisis. All main parties promise action to reduce them, but there is little difference between them in terms of the policies that they would pursue to meet this...

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

Barbara Petrongolo outlines how his analysis of markets with search frictions has enhanced our understanding of how labour markets work and how policy-makers should respond

Despite dire predictions, the UK capital has experienced a relatively mild recession, at least so far - Henry Overman asks what went right

The rise in joblessness among young people began long before the recession - Barbara Petrongolo and John Van Reenen consider potential explanations.

We investigate cross-hour effects in spousal labor supply exploiting independent variation in hours worked generated by the introduction of the short workweek in France in the late 1990s. We find that female and male employees treated by the shorter legal workweek reduce their weekly labor...

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labour markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of nonoverlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labour markets...

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled- to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework,...

Average earnings vary widely across the regions of Britain, a fact that has prompted many decades of policies aimed at reducing regional disparities. But as Henry Overman and Steve Gibbons demonstrate, such variation reveals little, especially if we ignore regional differences in the cost of...