Live music in the UK: what’s the state of the industry?
Almost 20 million people attended live music in the UK in 2023, yet two grassroots venues closed every week that year. Charlie Meyrick at LSE lays out the economics of this contradiction: rising energy, staffing and rent costs; shrinking post-pandemic audiences among younger cohorts; and a cost-of-touring crisis shaped by Brexit customs requirements and lost EU revenue, with artists earning under £25,000 losing almost half their EU income. Policy options covered include an ar
Wellbeing policy: what lessons from the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman?
Written by Richard Layard at LSE, a collaborator of Kahneman's for over two decades, this is less a biographical tribute than a personal account of how Kahneman's work reshaped policy thinking on wellbeing. Layard explains the pension opt-in/opt-out experiment as a clean demonstration of defaults and framing, traces the evolution of wellbeing measurement from Diener onwards, and describes how the UK Treasury Green Book came to include subjective wellbeing as a policy criterio
What can sport learn from economics and economics from sport?
Tim Harcourt at the University of Technology Sydney walks through the application of game theory and statistics to professional sport, from Moneyball's approach to scouting baseball players to Robert Tollinson's research justifying the NBA's three-point revolution. Sport functions here as a low-friction entry point to game theory, labour market discrimination, salary caps, and winner-takes-all markets, and the economics is worn lightly enough that non-specialist students will