What policies and institutions are needed to sustain long-run growth in the UK? We describe an optimistic story of the UK economy over the past 30 years. From the late 1970s, the UK reversed a century of relative decline in terms of per capita GDP with our main counterparts in the US, France and...

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigration, austerity, real wages and living standards, productivity and business,...

What policies and institutions are needed to sustain long-run growth in the UK? We describe an optimistic story of the UK economy over the past 30 years. From the late 1970s, the UK reversed a century of relative decline in terms of per capita GDP with our main counterparts in the US, France and...

What institutions and policies are needed to sustain UK economic growth in the dynamic world economy of the twentyfirst century? After years of inadequate investment in skills, infrastructure and innovation, there are longstanding structural weaknesses in the economy, all rooted in a failure to...

UK productivity stagnated after the Great Recession of 2008-09 and remains about 15 percent below historical trends. This 'productivity puzzle' is due to a mixture of cyclical and structural effects - the fall is not entirely permanent; and has led to a widening of the longstanding gap with...

In the wake of the global financial crisis, several macroeconomic contributions have highlighted the risks of excessive credit expansion. In particular, too much finance can have a negative impact on growth. We examine the microeconomic foundations of this argument, positing a non-monotonic...

The paper provides a simple theory and empirical evidence on the asymmetric effect of credit markets on output decline and output growth. When credit markets are underdeveloped and enterprise activity is financed outside the banking sector, exogenous shocks may induce a break-up of both credit...

This paper studies the relationship between leverage and growth, focusing on a large sample of firms in emerging economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE). Contrary to the general wisdom, we find that deviation from optimal leverage, especially excess leverage, is common among firms in many...

The paper examines the relationship between leverage and growth in a group of emerging central and eastern European countries, who are at different levels of financial market development. We hypothesize a non-linear relationship in that moderate leverage could boost growth while very high...

The paper develops a simple model on the asymmetric role of credit markets in output fluctuations. When credit markets are underdeveloped and enterprise activity is financed by trade credit, shocks may induce a break-up of credit and production chains, leading to sudden and sharp contractions....