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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

Essays in Gender Norms, Household Dynamics, and Economic Outcomes 

I am an applied microeconomist interested in labour, family, and development, focusing on how gender relations and social norms shape inequalities within households over the life course.

One strand of my research examines how demographic change, intergenerational relationships, and shifting care responsibilities shape labour market behaviour and economic inequalities over the life course.

In my job market paper ‘The Gendered Juggle of Grandparenthood: Labour Market Differences Within Couples’ I study how the transition to grandparenthood widens inequalities within households by imposing a new labour market penalty on ageing women. 

Another part of my work examines how social protection and health interventions can shift intra-household bargaining dynamics and strengthen women’s agency. 

You can read more about my research here.

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

Green Economics and Sustainable Finance in Real Economy

My research lies at the intersection of green economics and sustainable finance, with a focus on China and the United States.

I study how green financial instruments and environmental policy frameworks interact with financial markets and the real economy across different institutional settings.

My work examines how sustainability-oriented financing is linked to broader economic and structural outcomes, including investment patterns and long-term development dynamics.

More broadly, I aim to contribute to a comparative understanding of how climate-related policies are transmitted through financial systems and shape economic transformation in both advanced and emerging economies.

Contact: Chuyi.Li@liverpool.ac.uk

Yiran Li

Electric vehicles’ adoption in China

This study aims to apply empirical IO methods to analyse electric vehicles market, including consumer preference, firm behaviour, and the effects of policy incentives, thereby contributing to the understanding of green transitions in emerging economies.

Contact: Y.Li461@liverpool.ac.uk

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

Investing in Your Future? How the Cost of University Shapes Labour Market Outcomes

Abstract:

Reducing subsidies to higher education raises concerns about people’s willingness to invest in human capital, yet little is known about these effects in settings without credit constraints.

I exploit a natural experiment in which the UK government substantially reduced subsidies by raising the price control on university tuition fees to estimate the causal impact on enrolment and early-career labour market outcomes using a difference-in-discontinuities design.

Contact: lukewalsh308@gmail.com