The LSESU Economics Society Essay Competition is the rare essay prize that is free to enter, open to secondary students worldwide, and set by working academics — the five 2026 questions each come from a professor in the LSE Economics Department, including Sir Christopher Pissarides, the 2010 Nobel laureate. Essays of up to 1,500 words are due September 1, 2026.
One clarification worth making early, because sloppier guides get it wrong: the competition is run by the LSESU Economics Society, a student society at LSE — not by the university itself. That does not make it less worth entering. The questions are genuinely professorial, the field is international, and it is one of the best low-cost tests of whether a student can argue in economics rather than merely describe it.
This guide takes each 2026 question in turn: what it is actually asking, the trap most entrants will fall into, and the economic machinery you need to answer it well. The question texts below are as circulated in the competition's materials; before submitting, confirm the wording and rules on the official LSESU Economics Society site.
How the Competition Works
The rules are short and worth internalising before you pick a question:
One essay, one question.: You answer exactly one of the five prompts.
1,500 words maximum,: excluding references.
Free to enter,: open to secondary school students worldwide.
Formatting:: 12pt Times New Roman, 1.5 line spacing, page numbers.
Referencing:: Harvard style is recommended.
Academic honesty:: plagiarism and AI-generated writing are both forbidden.
Deadline:: September 1, 2026.
Unusually — and usefully — the society publishes its judging rubric. One hundred points, weighted like this:
Argument and originality: 25 points.: The single largest line. An accurate essay that says what everyone says cannot win.
Economic theories: 20 points.: Named frameworks, correctly applied.
Evidence and examples: 15 points.: Real data and cases, not stylised hypotheticals.
Critical analysis: 15 points.: Knowing where your own argument is weakest.
Structure and clarity: 10 points.:
Citations and sources: 10 points.:
Topic relevance: 5 points.: Answer the question that was set.
Notice what that weighting implies: forty of the hundred points sit in argument, originality, and critical analysis. The winning essays are not the ones that survey a topic most thoroughly — they are the ones that take a position a professor has not read four hundred times already.
Question 1: Working From Home vs. Monitoring (Prof. Sir Christopher Pissarides)
The question: workers like working from home — say, one day a week — but hate the monitoring devices firms might use to see how they spend that day. What should a firm do if it wants to motivate workers by giving them something they like, while making sure it gets its money's worth?
What it is really asking. This is a principal–agent problem dressed in office clothes. The firm (principal) cannot perfectly observe the worker's (agent's) effort at home. Monitoring reduces the information gap but destroys precisely the motivational value the perk was supposed to create. Pissarides is inviting you to design an incentive contract: how do you buy effort when surveillance is counterproductive?
The trap. Writing a human-resources opinion piece — "trust your employees, culture matters" — with no economic mechanism. The question rewards entrants who name the trade-off formally and propose an arrangement that resolves it.
The toolkit. Principal–agent theory and monitoring costs; efficiency wages; Akerlof's gift-exchange model, which predicts exactly the reciprocity a no-surveillance policy is betting on; and output-based rather than input-based contracts — paying for what is produced instead of watching how hours are spent. The strongest essays will also cite the empirical work-from-home literature: Nicholas Bloom's randomised experiments on remote work are the natural anchor, and they give you real productivity numbers rather than intuitions.
Where to start reading. Bloom's Stanford work-from-home studies, Akerlof's "Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange," and any good treatment of the principal–agent model — even an A-level or AP-level one, applied precisely, beats a name-dropped paper you have not understood.
Question 2: An Energy Shock Brief for the Central Bank (Prof. Ricardo Reis)
The question: after a sharp rise in UK energy prices, prepare a brief for a central bank on how monetary policy should respond — given that the UK is a net energy importer and the Bank of England targets 2% inflation.
What it is really asking. How should monetary policy treat an imported supply shock? Energy-price inflation is not caused by domestic overheating, and raising interest rates does not lower the world price of gas. But letting inflation run risks de-anchoring expectations and triggering second-round effects through wage bargaining. Reis — who has written extensively on inflation expectations — is asking you to weigh looking through a transitory shock against defending the credibility of the target.
The trap. Reciting "inflation high, therefore raise rates" without noticing the question's two deliberate hints: the UK is a net importer (the shock is a terms-of-trade loss — the country as a whole is poorer, and monetary policy cannot undo that) and the mandate is 2% (credibility is the asset being defended, not this month's price level).
The toolkit. Cost-push versus demand-pull inflation; the expectations-augmented Phillips curve; second-round effects and wage-price dynamics; the exchange-rate channel, since tightening supports sterling and cheapens imported energy somewhat. And you have a live case study: the UK's own 2021–2023 energy episode, with the Bank of England's actual decisions to praise or criticise.
One format point. The question says "prepare a brief." Write one: recommendation first, reasoning after, risks acknowledged at the end. An entrant who structures the essay as an actual policy brief — while the rest submit generic essays — collects the structure points before the argument even begins.
Where to start reading. The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Reports from 2022–23, and Reis's accessible writing on what anchored expectations mean and why central banks fear losing them.
Question 3: AI, Unemployment, and Inequality (Prof. Silvana Tenreyro)
The question: suppose AI reduces the number of people needed for a large fraction of jobs, threatening high unemployment. What measures should limit inequality in pay — and, ideally, in hours worked?
What it is really asking. Policy design under technological displacement. Note the second clause, which most entrants will skim past: inequality in hours worked. That is an invitation to discuss work-sharing — shorter standard weeks, job splitting — not just income redistribution. Tenreyro is asking who captures the gains from automation, and what instruments could spread both the income and the remaining work more evenly.
The trap. The utopian universal-basic-income essay: heavy on vision, empty on mechanism, silent on cost. If you propose UBI, you must say what it costs, who pays, and what it does to labour supply — or propose something better-targeted instead.
The toolkit. The task-based framework of Acemoglu and Restrepo — automation versus augmentation, displacement versus reinstatement of labour; skill-biased technological change; the menu of redistribution instruments with their trade-offs: wage subsidies and earned-income credits, negative income tax, taxes on capital income (if AI shifts income from labour to capital, the tax base should follow it), and retraining with an honest note on its mixed record. For the hours dimension: work-sharing schemes and the long-run fall in working hours that previous technological revolutions produced.
Where to start reading. Acemoglu and Restrepo on automation and tasks; David Autor on labour-market polarisation; and, for a counterweight, any serious recent estimate of AI's actual measured employment effects so far — grounding a speculative question in current evidence is itself a mark of quality.
Question 4: Taxing the Top 1% (Prof. John Van Reenen)
The question: is it possible and desirable to raise taxation on the top 1%?
What it is really asking. Read the wording: possible and desirable are two separate questions, and the essay must answer both. Possibility is an empirical matter — how do the very rich respond to higher rates? Avoidance, income shifting between labour and capital, and migration are behavioural responses that shrink the base as the rate rises. Desirability is optimal-tax theory — the equity-efficiency trade-off and where the revenue-maximising top rate actually sits.
The trap. A moral essay with no elasticities. Whether top-end taxation "works" is one of the most heavily studied questions in public economics; an essay that argues from fairness alone, in either direction, ignores the 20 points sitting under "economic theories."
The toolkit. Diamond and Saez on optimal top rates; taxable-income elasticities; the difference between taxing labour income, capital income, and wealth (and why the last is hardest to administer); international coordination and the recent global minimum tax as evidence that avoidance constraints can be loosened by policy. Van Reenen's own empirical bent is a hint: numbers are welcome here.
Where to start reading. Saez and Zucman's work on top-end taxation, the Mirrlees Review's chapters on the top rate, and — for balance — a credible sceptical treatment of wealth taxes, because conceding the strongest counter-case is exactly what "critical analysis" means on the rubric.
A warning about crowding. This is the most accessible question of the five, which means it will be the most answered. If you choose it, your originality burden is highest — a competent survey of both sides will disappear into the pile.
Question 5: Green Technology and the Distribution of Wealth (Prof. Michael Gmeiner)
The question: how will the development and adoption of climate-friendly technologies affect inequality and the distribution of wealth?
What it is really asking. A distributional-incidence question, not a climate question. Who owns the green technologies and collects the returns? Who works in the industries that grow, and who worked in the ones that shrink? Do falling clean-energy costs help poor households (energy is a large share of their budgets) or hurt them (transition costs, higher prices during the shift)? And between countries: does the green transition narrow or widen the global gap?
The trap. Writing a climate essay — why decarbonisation matters — instead of an economics essay about distribution. The judges know climate change matters. They are asking who gains and who loses from the response.
The toolkit. Distributional incidence of carbon pricing and how revenue recycling (carbon dividends) can flip it from regressive to progressive; capital ownership concentration — if green tech's returns accrue to shareholders, adoption can raise wealth inequality even while cutting emissions; labour reallocation and the "just transition" literature on displaced fossil-fuel workers; and the North–South dimension: technology transfer, who manufactures, who licenses.
Where to start reading. IEA and IMF work on the distributional effects of the energy transition, and the carbon-dividend literature. This is the least crowded question of the five — genuinely good entries here face the thinnest competition.
Which Question Should You Choose?
Not the one whose topic you like most — the one where you can be original with evidence you can actually obtain. Two practical rules from coaching students through this competition:
Run the originality test.: Write down the answer most entrants will give. If you cannot describe how yours differs, keep thinking or switch questions.
Check your evidence access before committing.: Question 2 has decades of central-bank publications free online; Question 3's best evidence is newer and thinner. A question you can document beats a question you can only theorise about.
For what it is worth: Question 4 will be the most crowded, Questions 1 and 5 the least. Choosing against the crowd is a legitimate strategy when 25 of 100 points sit under originality.
From Plan to Submission
Fifteen hundred words is unforgiving — it is roughly five paragraphs of real argument after the introduction and conclusion take their share. We have published a free printable LSESU essay planner that maps a 1,500-word structure onto the official rubric, with a self-audit checklist for the week before the deadline. It pairs with the rest of our free resource library.
If you want mentored preparation, our Economics Scholar program runs one-on-one through the summer — prompt analysis, economic frameworks, evidence, and supervised drafts before September 1 — and continues into the John Locke economics category and the Cambridge Re:think competition for students who want a second target. You can see how our writing students have performed across competitions on our results page, or explore the full Writing Scholars Program.
Whichever route you take: choose your question this month, not in August. The students who win are the ones whose essays had time to be wrong once.