Review of periodical literature published in 2024: 1945–present

The periodical literature on the period 1945–present published in 2024 focused on themes including labour markets, inequality, monetary policy, and the effects of technological change on jobs, growth, and productivity. The impacts of major shocks, especially Brexit and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, continued to permeate the literature, alongside work on historical business cycles, especially inflationary episodes. Following Claudia Goldin's Nobel Prize, research on gender pay gaps and gendered labour market dynamics remained strong. Papers also explored topics including environmental outcomes, automation, populism, and wealth inequality. Methodologically, many studies drew on large datasets or featured substantial data collection efforts, with diverse theoretical and empirical contributions, the use of causal inference techniques, and historical approaches. Longer-run perspectives were popular, focusing on centuries or decades rather than years. Eight years after the Brexit referendum, the impacts remained a major focus. Directly, Kren and Lawless show that Brexit decreased trade from the United Kingdom to the EU and from the EU to the United Kingdom, using new benchmarks to estimate a decrease of 20 per cent in both directions. Focused specifically on United Kingdom–Spain trade flows, De Lucio et al. find decreases of 24–27 per cent and show that Brexit decreased the probability of Spanish firms entering the UK market. Tamberi focuses on foreign direct investment (FDI) where the host and origin company export to third markets, finding that the Brexit vote led foreign firms to be less likely to invest in export-platform FDI in the United Kingdom, instead preferring EU countries. The impact of Brexit on exchange rates was explored by Manasse et al., who show that the probability of a ‘leave’ vote predicted depreciation of the pound via expectations and political risk leading up to the referendum, as well as by Venturi et al., who show how anticipated, uncertain binary political events such as Brexit impacted exchange rates by changing the mean of the distribution of exchange rate returns. In the Review of Economic Studies, Broadbent et al. use a small open economy model to show that Brexit was a news shock indicating that productivity growth in the tradable sector would decrease in the future. This caused downwards adjustments to relative prices in the non-tradable sector, creating a positive but temporary boost for tradables. Geiger and Güntner construct an instrument for Brexit surprises from detailed lists of official Brexit events, showing that the effects extended beyond the ‘leave’ vote itself, with multiple Brexit surprises lowering GDP growth and impacting consumer confidence. Shifting to health impacts, Rienzo shows that, after the Brexit vote, mental health relatively improved for non-EU immigrants, perhaps owing to less perceived discrimination in favour of EU immigrants. On the policy side, Rubio identifies welfare benefits to the United Kingdom from Brexit from being able to set its own macroprudential policies. Another large area of focus in the literature was the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Anaya et al. use a difference-in-difference approach to find a large decrease in mental health during the initial wave of the pandemic from March to May 2020. Foliano et al. leverage 24-hour time-use diaries and an event-study approach to show that self-reported well-being fell by about half of a standard deviation during the strictest UK lockdowns, with much greater effects for women than men. Their data suggest this was because of a decline in the share of time spent on leisure and with non-family members, which comprises a large share of women's well-being. Yet, policies preventing further employment loss may have supported mental health, as Kopasker et al. find that the United Kingdom's economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic prevented a 3.4 percentage point increase in common mental disorders through the economic channel alone. The distributional impacts of the pandemic are further explored through the spread of the disease itself by Corradini et al., who show that local areas with more key workers experienced greater incidence of COVID-19 during the pandemic. Bacevic and McGoey consider the rhetoric used by the UK government in the early pandemic, arguing that the government appealed to ignorance and fatalism to maintain political legitimacy. One pandemic policy was minimum unit pricing enacted on cheap alcohol in Wales, which Bokhari et al. find reduced the demand for alcohol during the pandemic in Wales relative to England. Moving to a broader European perspective, Moreno et al. correlate the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic with the severity of the 2007–9 global financial crisis, finding a positive correlation possibly owing to differences in healthcare resources. Davies et al. discuss the rise of a ‘domestic regime’ since the financial crisis and COVID-19, where the home and household have become a core political and economic unit. Technological change and automation are themes of growing interest. While much of the focus on recent technological change has emphasized the impact of automation on demand for existing jobs, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Autor et al. remind us that technological change also generates new jobs and work tasks. They construct a database of new job tasks and titles introduced since 1940 in the United States, linked to measures of innovation from patent data. They find that from 1940 to 1980 new work tasks were primarily middle-paid production and clerical tasks, while after 1980 they were polarized towards high-paid professional tasks and low-paid service tasks. The introduction of new processes, products, services, and industries (which they call ‘augmentation’) creates more new work than automation of existing tasks and also increases employment and wages in existing exposed occupations. They find that, since 1980, automation's negative impacts on demand have intensified and the positive impacts of augmentation have declined. The augmentation versus automation framework that they empirically test, and the separation of their impacts on new versus existing work, provides a helpful and theoretically grounded template for researchers interested in the impact of technological change on work in history. Some papers focused specifically on the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT). Albinowski and Lewandowski explore the effects of ICT and robots on labour markets in 14 countries 2010–8. They find that ICT and robots increased the share of women and young workers in employment and decreased the share of men, with effects above and beyond just those from the different occupational exposures to technological change of the different demographic groups. Coyle et al. compare firm-level total factor productivity after the Great Recession in ICT and manufacturing sectors using a structural model. While TFP fell in manufacturing and rose in ICT, both sectors had declines in within-firm TFP levels. Hötte et al. explore the impact of automation on public revenue across Europe, finding that, post-2007, the impact of automation on tax revenues has been very small and that, for ICT specifically, it has been negligible. The impacts of the General Data Progection Regulation (GDPR) were also analysed. Frey and Presidente find that GDPR increased costs to firms, decreasing technology company profits by about 2 per cent. Goldberg et al. show that GDPR reduced website views and revenue by 12 per cent where implemented. On automation, Gimenez-Nadal and Sevilla use time-use surveys to show that effort at work has intensified since the 1980s. The greatest increases in work effort were found for those workers in occupations with routine tasks as a result of automation technologies making all aspects of routine work more efficient. Drydakis presents some recent evidence from the United Kingdom that having taken an artificial intelligence (AI) module makes university students more likely to land job interviews after graduation. Pérez Rodríguez et al. measure whether workforce skills (literacy and numeracy) match the requirements of available jobs using the job analysis method for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. More broadly on education, Battistin and Neri explore the effects of score inflation on national exams in England, showing that score inflation led to gentrification owing to the perceptions of improving school quality. They identify that this sorting led to real increases in house prices and the quality of schools in local areas. McNally et al. consider how further education and sixth form college can be improved, finding from survey evidence that improvements in management practices benefit educational outcomes, especially for low-income students. Broadening to a comparison of eight countries, Bonomi Bezzo et al. explore why parental education has such a large impact on sons’ earnings. In countries such as Norway and the United States, these effects are mediated through sons’ increased quantity of education, while other non-human capital factors that could include social networks are found to have played a larger role in countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. Interest in historical business cycles remained high. In Explorations in Economic History, Broadberry and Lennard evaluate the patterns and co-movements of business cycles in the United Kingdom and eight other European countries from 1300 to 2000. They find a large relative moderation of business cycle downturns. From 1950 to 2000, only 11 per cent of time was spent in a business cycle contraction, compared with 43 per cent on average from 1300 to 2000. The amplitude of expansions in this recent period was also over four times higher than on average. The recent dampening of business cycle contractions appears key for long-term economic growth. Recent inflationary surges have sparked interest in inflationary episodes. Alvarez et al. identify wage–price spirals back to 1960 as episodes with three of four successive quarters having rising consumer prices and nominal wages. Of the 79 episodes they found in 38 countries, the majority were not followed by persistent acceleration in wages and prices but rather led to stabilization, suggesting wage–price spirals are generally short-lived. Grigoli and Pugacheva use credit card data for the United Kingdom and Germany to track changes in consumption at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that the inflation consumers actually experienced was initially higher than the official fixed-weight indexes suggest. Camacho et al. discuss how the strong economic and policy impacts of COVID-19 have disturbed standard parametric recession forecasting models, requiring the data from these years to be dropped or modelled as a structural break. They propose an alternative non-parametric method of recession forecasting that can handle the irregularities of the pandemic. Castle and Hendry explore why the UK Phillips curve has been unstable the past 160 years. They present Phillips curves for subsamples, showing a very steep and positive relationship between unemployment and wage inflation from 1946 to 1980 that becomes flatter through 2021. Accounting for other factors, however, yields an underlying relationship between unemployment and wages that is consistently negative across the whole period. Gökten et al. consider the labour markets of EU countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States back to the 1970s, measuring deviations from a full employment rate based on the Beveridge curve. They find that the United Kingdom experienced a very large deviation from this new measure of full employment throughout the early to mid-1980s, greater than all comparison countries. Baqaee et al. show that aggregate inflation statistics for the United Kingdom in 1974–2017 overstate real consumption gains for poorest households and understate them for the richest households. In the pages of History of Political Economy, Nelson and Cristiano debate how UK policymakers historically interpreted the causes of inflation, especially during the Great Inflation period of the 1970s. While their 2024 exchange leans towards the rhetorical, Oliver, writing in The Financial History Review, presents further evidence for Nelson's ‘monetary policy neglect’ thesis that monetary factors were initially neglected by policymakers, while also showing that by the late 1970s they had become more recognized. Cyclical impacts were also considered in other settings. David et al. explore the UK art market, finding that art is a safe haven investment during political turmoil, but not during economic downturns. The art market slumped during all of the postwar recessions, but especially during the early 1990s recession, when a large art bubble burst. Focusing just on one institution, Jones et al. show how Barclays increased its sponsorship of the arts during a troubled period for the bank in the 1970s and 1980s, advancing its organizational legitimacy and gaining the symbolic capital of arts institutions. A number of papers explored wages. Using a new dataset of any firm that was in the top 300 on the London Stock Exchange for more than 3 years from 1983 to et al. show that the of to wages from the 1980s. The from between 1983 and to from to that workers not benefit as much from through higher wages. and explore wage growth in the United Kingdom from They find that the sector wage growth, with wages with some that market increases the between capital and labour recent UK manufacturing at the impacts of across the wage distribution using UK data from to finding that impacted workers at the of the wage distribution but had impacts on those in the and to in et al. use data on to show that as a are with less time spent in employment as an et al. explore the effects of that welfare to a model to the United Kingdom's they show that, while these are on the on the be taken to to be growing interest in aspects of work and the role of job quality and in the labour et al. show that wages and job quality are using recent data for the United to for job and only at wage causes to be by a third and to of differences in labour market by gender and et al. use recent UK data to show that the is They find that, rather than a workers are for jobs that them up the during especially jobs with improved On and work, et al. use UK data to show that, while is to decline these impacts are greatest for with a strong work and and for women with more The in labour productivity in many countries is by et al., who that policies investment and technological change to be how an official the of technologies from the United States to in the led to large increases in productivity at impacted and an of for countries, finding that increased labour productivity. gaps in economic an area of focus Claudia Goldin's Nobel in Nobel the that has been in gender in the labour market, the role of jobs, education, and reduced women how labour markets the of labour in the especially through jobs that the that would to more share the work on gender pay Focused on the United States, et al. show that in the led to a large of the gender pay and relative gains in wages for Foliano et al. find that the gender wage young in the United Kingdom from to in with This was by the wages of rather than where the not at young but across countries, et al. find large in of the gender wage in the United Kingdom and other countries. in the United Kingdom, Jones and find a per cent gender pay the of the labour a key in studies of the gender pay the impacts of this by using the for based on the welfare as an The that the labour is in the United Kingdom relative to other countries and that for this the gender wage why was one of the countries to pay on whether such the economy by or by for market gaps were also considered other Jones the in pay between with and in the United Kingdom, finding that the mean is about per cent. The is larger in the sector than the public Using recent UK wage gaps between and with and their capital and is United rather than wage are Some papers in 2024 specifically at wealth inequality. to explore in wealth between groups. While historically have been more than this to by the but with across groups. and were found to have much less relative wealth a of wealth and in and the United States, showing that, while of wealth have wealth has actually been historically in in recent and up the of the decline of the wealth of the They find that it less than after the and it was not with the decline in land In the Journal of one of wealth inequality, which is increased global Using and data from to increases in financial were found to increase wealth of the top and per cent. The was especially strong when and the could wealth than those at the of the wealth Shifting to inequality, Castle et al. how forecasting can be used to estimate the share of the top per cent in the United Kingdom, that the share be about 12 per cent in et al. explore how labour and market since impacted in countries, finding that they led to a small but positive increase in inequality. et al. focus to household inequality, finding changes in for those with in the per cent of the distribution from to was higher in perhaps owing to an increase in and households. The economic effects of patterns were also et al. the impacts of and on economic growth. Their to the United Kingdom, shows that had positive benefits to growth from to but has had negative effects the past 20 years that are to and show that the impact of monetary policy on interest rates with improved rates leading to increased This is in the United Kingdom than in the United States because are more common in the In et al. global real interest finding that they have been downwards since the This about the of the decline in interest rates since the 1980s. and compare the in the United Kingdom and finding in the of social to risk to to et al. show that UK company their to their tax their real business et al. explore how tax policy differences in growth showing that are in in because of in the relationship between and growth. On the monetary and prices from the London for not just from official but also from which the of the They find that of prices such as were generally shows that, in the the pound could not with the and was only an in the et al. show that UK monetary policy has impacts on the prices of the et al. to of the of the of by the and role of economic research at the three of In the economic research was on the but not primarily by policy In the economic research was less a for and was more focused on for after research more and focused on macroprudential and evidence on how GDP is to the They find that the public but not form expectations about that could information on alongside GDP the of papers on and was interest in the rise of the European to show that those who were exposed to in as a young less with national and are more likely to vote for using the European et al. show that economic increases the vote share but that a large of this increase is by a in across UK cycles, and find for the that, in economic for is to a of their own financial well-being. and whether economic news is in United and finding a generally positive correlation during the were a papers on the impact of environmental change on economic et al. explore how GDP to changes in improving on by a global and using local They find across countries, with some of the poorest countries from while the United Kingdom and other of countries large GDP In and show that structural to and since the 1970s, of which the United Kingdom had a relatively large number of the have been at lowering per but have per unit of Focused more specifically on the United Kingdom, et al. the health benefits of and an tax which increases in tax levels. the welfare effects of in The Economic In a model positive effects the negative welfare of a reduced the was strong for the policy to have an positive welfare from a more historical perspective, London events to identify with increased to show that was a major to in London in the On policy, shows that policies in Wales were in the when they extended measures that manufacturing policy, the focusing on social and to in Focusing on et al. explore in the United Kingdom, using in prices to show that consider the to when on the of et al. use data from the on to show that, after for were the of was also in et al. construct a new database of in by the public in their for the firm was in the top and They show that early were for their professional skills and were as rather than social Yet, the majority of not have a the when the was and more bank to the and of from the to 1980s, showing how they were an early at creating a European the rise of the UK sector showing how and Some focus on the of to the market from consumers not much about from some negative based on their was a the of the United Kingdom's sector after the introduction of showing how this new technology the tasks of labour and how these workers their et al. use new interviews with and to explore of in in the 1970s. was as a with a in the 1970s, the to the for the of over the period of the The initial to to the to as and find in a of European countries that not government more efficient. et al. the of in the United Kingdom, finding that per cent of in are