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Doctoral Researchers in Economics

Meet our PhD students and discover their innovative ideas and research in the area of Economics.

Students working on a project together

Victoria Biagi

The Political Economy of Crime: Mafia Legacies, Local Interventions and Social Cohesion

This research project investigates the socio-economic impacts of crime, with a particular focus on mafia influence, urban development, and local policy interventions.

The first paper examines the repurposing of confiscated mafia properties for educational use in Italy, revealing that such initiatives reduce school dropout rates, particularly in mafia-dominated neighbourhoods.

The second paper explores the historical influence of the mafia on Sicily’s judiciary, showing that mafia presence reduces the number of lawyers and civil court sentences, as the mafia enforces an alternative system of conflict resolution.

The third paper analyzes the local effects of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) in London, assessing how these orders, implemented to control antisocial behaviour, affect crime rates, local voting patterns, and the community.

Together, these studies highlight the complex interactions between crime, urban policies, and social structures, offering insights into how local policies and urban development can reshape communities and reduce crime when properly implemented.

Contact:

Jessica Botros

Understanding the Sources of Inequality Throughout the Earnings Distribution

My research includes three interconnected projects on the sources of inequality.

The first paper takes a cross-country approach to studying how economic shocks at labor market entry affect intergenerational mobility. It examines how adverse economic conditions disproportionately harm individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, widening socioeconomic disparities in access to higher education. Differences in human capital emerge as a key factor driving inequality in long-term outcomes.

The second paper focuses on the causal effects of policies aimed at increasing the human capital of disadvantaged children in the UK. Using administrative data, Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO), it analyses the long-term impacts of these educational policies on earnings, providing insights into their effectiveness in promoting intergenerational mobility and reducing inequalities.

The third paper will examine the impact of graduating during a recession on family formation and fertility, assessing whether entering the labor market during periods of high unemployment creates intergenerational consequences for children.

Contact: 

Weiran Cao

Jingwen Chen

The Influence of Sharing Economy on the Traditional Industries

The impact of the sharing economy on traditional industries mainly focuses on tourism, the hotel industry, transportation and ecological protection.

The paper will explore Airbnb's influence on hotels in England by estimating monthly hotel room revenue before and after Airbnb's entry in the market.

Economic research methods will be used and machine learning will also be the main part of this research.

Contact:

Shoumeli Das

This research lies at the intersection of gender and development economics, with focus on marginalised socio-economic groups in India.

My project aims to explore notions of intersectional empowerment for women around microfinance and labour in India.

Contact: 

Concetta Gigante

Satyam Goel

Intergenerational Distributional Impact of Monetary Policy

Monetary policy may influence the short-run dynamics of income and wealth inequality.

While the economy is susceptible to such an influence, the unprecedented ways in which central banking and monetary policy have changed post the financial crisis of 2007-08 and COVID-19 make it critical to perceive the size and direction of these distributive effects.

This research proposes to study these distributional impacts in a life cycle framework to strengthen the central banks’ approach to interventions.

Contact: 

Nariman Hanno

Melissa Kalitera

Claire Lebrun

Evolving networks for modelling daily written media-based data

This project uses a unique database that identifies written causal statements between economic indicators and events with daily precision, from 50,000 news and media articles collected over a decade from 172 media sources.

My project models these interactions as an evolving dynamic network, represented by daily weighted, directed graphs.

The first aim is to use the growing field of network science and models such as the preferential attachment and machine learning models for link prediction to enhance our understanding of the future dynamic of media’s influence on the global economy.

Then, these predicted interactions can be used for financial applications to create a risk index using the predicted co-mentions, based on network metrics such as the distance between each country or industry and high-risk economic indicators to measure potential exposure.

Contact: 

Chuyi Li

Yiran Li

Yalew Mekonnen Marilign

Digitalization in Agricultural Transformation in Rural Ethiopia

The focus is on how information and technology can contribute to transforming Ethiopian agriculture.

Contact: 

Jonathan Rae

An Empirical Examination of Risk-Seeking Behaviour and Managerial Change

My research is concerned with the drivers of managerial change, with a particular focus on the degree to which senior decision makers allow behavioural factors to affect their decision-making processes when considering whether or not to replace a manager.

I am using the setting of professional football to examine this phenomena.

Contact: 

Yevhenii Skok

Optimal Monetary Policy and Financial Stability

After the global financial crisis, the role of monetary policy in ensuring financial stability increased considerably.

Alongside this, the interrelation between monetary policy and financial stability has become a hotly debated and widely researched topic.

The issues mentioned above contributed to the formulation of the core question of my research, which is how changes in monetary policy interest rates affect the stability of the banking sector.

Examining this issue, the study intends to develop monetary policy, a new-Keynesian DSGE framework with heterogeneous banks and the possibility of their default.

In addition to its macroeconomic content, this modeling approach allows one to assess the impact of monetary policy on the bank default risk under the application of different monetary policy rules.

Hence, this research aims to provide a cutting-edge theoretical and empirical foundation for optimal monetary policy and to be of great use to monetary authorities for monetary policy, financial stability, and macroprudential policy.

Contact: 

Michael Taylor

Understanding how workload, cultural diversity and worker relocation impact individual and team productivity over time through analysing productivity data from European football

My research paper will look to produce a detailed data model using tracking and action-based data within football to estimate the individual productivity of players.

This data will then be used to explore and test how individual productivity is affected by factors relating to behavioural economics and management to provide new insight to both the academic and sporting communities, particularly stakeholders within football itself.

Contact: 

Panagiotis Veneris

Debt Deleveraging, Stagnation Traps, and the Optimal Design of Monetary, Fiscal, and Exchange Rate Policy

In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, many advanced economies engaged in a process of debt deleveraging followed by a sustained plunge in economic activity, the Great Recession.

Some of these economies experienced a long-lasting slump in key macroeconomic variables, such as employment and growth, despite the fact that policy rates were set at the lower bound.

Episodes of low growth, high unemployment and a binding ZLB are referred to as Stagnation Traps, that is, the combination of a liquidity and a growth trap.

The aim of my research is to uncover how deleveraging in one part of the globe is likely to induce deleveraging in another part of the globe, and what is the underlying transmission mechanism.

Next, I will try to understand through which channels stagnation traps could spread across countries.

After attacking these questions, the focus will be shifted to the design and implementation of optimal policies.

In particular, I will try to welfare-rank optimal alternative policies, including monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policies as well as a mix of them.

Being able to identify optimal policies that prevent stagnation from spreading among countries is going to have several policy implications and will be of great interest to policymakers.

Contact: 

More about Panagiotis

Visit Panagiotis' website

Luke Walsh

Pay Information Disclosure: Does Wage Transparency Affect the Gender Pay Gap?

This research uses modern advances in micro-econometric techniques to analyse the impact of pay secrecy reforms in the US.

These reforms prevent employers from disincentivising workers from discussing their pay both inside and outside the workplace.

This project focusses on whether wages increase for all workers as a result of pay transparency policies, as well as whether these policies can be used as a tool to reduce the gender pay gap by highlighting pay discrimination.

Contact: