Rising income inequality has recently come centre-stage as a core societal concern for rich countries. The diagnosis of the forces driving inequality upwards and their relative importance remains hotly contested, notably with respect to the roles of globalization versus technology and of market...

This paper uses the marked divergence in labour force participation trends between the US and the UK to probe underlying drivers and implications for recent US poor performance. Contrary to a common US narrative, our comparative perspective suggests that the relative decline in US labour force...

We nowcast the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and related lock-down measures in the UK and then analyse the distributional and budgetary effects of the estimated individual income shocks, distinguishing between the effects of automatic stabilisers and those of the emergency policy...

The purpose of this note is to discuss the distributional effects of some a priori identified UBI schemes, as an illustration of the different trade-offs involved, and to foster the debate around UBI in France. All these schemes share the feature of retaining some limited form of targeting - in...

We develop a new methodology to nowcast the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and forecast its evolution in small, export-oriented countries. To this aim, we exploit variation in financial indexes at the industry level and relate them to the expected duration of the crisis for each industry, under...

Multiplicative models of firm dynamics á la Gibrat have become a standard reference in industrial organization. However, some unpleasant properties of their implied dynamics - namely, their explosive or implosive behaviour (firm size and number collapsing to zero or increasing indefinitely) -...

Traditional (i.e. analytical) modelling practices in the social sciences rely on a very well established, although implicit, methodological protocol, both with respect to the way models are presented and to the kinds of analysis that are performed. Unfortunately, computer-simulated models often...

We investigate the effects of income support on unemployment and welfare dynamics when stigma is attached to welfare provision. Stigma has been modelled in the literature as a cost of entry into welfare. Allowing for psychological factors, we assume that with stigma welfare provision leads to...

This paper studies how different behavioural norms affect individual and social welfare in a population with heterogeneous preferences. I assume preferences are private information, and that interactions between individuals do not involve communication, nor bargaining. I first compare two...