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

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Safa Basabreen headshot

Safa Basabreen

The Effect of Subjective Well-being on Saving Behaviour

The level of subjective well-being is at the heart of our understanding of what drives individual decision-making. Recent developments in self-reported welfare measures have heightened the need to investigate the financial decision-making of those who have rated themselves as more satisfied with their subjective well-being.

In order to better understand why people do not always approach saving decisions rationally, it would be interesting to investigate how saving behaviour would respond to changes in subjective well-being.

In my project, I utilise UK panel data methods to examine the effects of subjective well-being on personal saving behaviours. By examining the role of subjective well-being in saving behaviour, my research combines insights from happiness research and economics.

The findings from my research so far indicate that subjective well-being is positively related to active saving behaviour. I am currently looking into this association in-depth, including passive savings, as part of my current study.

Victoria Biagi headshot

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.

Jingwen Chen headshot

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.

Cheng-Hsiao Cheng headshot
Owen Croft headshot
Shoumeli Das headshot

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.

Davidmac O. Ekeocha headshot

Davidmac O. Ekeocha

Essays on Household Energy Poverty in the Global South

Broadly, my research intersects between International Development and Energy Economics. Pivotal to the Sustainable Development Goals is energy access. However, in developing countries, the lack thereof predominates.

Hence, my research focuses on experimental pathways of energy poverty interventions and life-cycle outcomes with gender implications in the Global South.

More about Davidmac

Satyam Goel headshot

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.

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.

Boju Li headshot

Boju Li

Digital Currency, Information Frictions and Monetary Policy

I am interested in macroeconomics and monetary theory. In my research, I study markets with search, information and financial frictions. Applications of my work include digital currency and optimal monetary policy with information frictions.

Antara Mandal headshot

Antara Mandal

Female Labour Market Participation in India

My research, primarily in the area of Development and Feminist Economics, talks about the discrepancies and consequent decrease in women’s labour market performance in India despite increasing education levels and lower levels of fertility reported in recent years.

At present, I am working on a subsection of the project that explains the history, contribution and impact of contraception usage on female labour market participation.

Societal and patriarchal bodies have a large impact on the personal and professional lives of Indian women, and it is my hope that my project brings to light many such lesser-known problems that impact female labour force participation in the country with an added, urgent need to tackle them.

My project also talks about the under-spoken effects of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and its impact on women’s fertility, health as well as labour force participation in the Indian subcontinent.

Tien Nguyen headshot

Tien Nguyen

What can we know from Game Theoretic applications in Cryptocurrency and Blockchain?

I am interested in researching and understanding the intersection of microeconomics, game theory and cryptocurrency.

The research focuses on addressing and answering the following question: What exactly is cryptocurrency? What economic value can it provide? How do we, as participants, interact in a cryptocurrency environment?

This is alongside how efficient and sustainable is the current mechanism of some common cryptocurrencies (i.e Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) in facilitating transactions or being an asset? What else can blockchain provide? To what extent can we apply monetary theory to understanding, building and improving the decentralized platform run by tokens?

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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.

Yevhenii Skok headshot

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.

Yuchen Su

Heterogeneous Agents and Money Demand in Micro-founded Model

Incorporating heterogeneity in macroeconomic models is arguably relevant and my research addresses an interesting topic by investigating whether money demand can be more accurately described by Lagos and Wright (2005) style models if heterogeneity is included.

The primary objective of my research is to incorporate three types of heterogeneity in a micro-founded model of money à la Lagos and Wright (2005) in order to explain the recent trend in the observed money demand: heterogeneity in the rate of time preference, heterogeneity in terms of exposure to monetary policy and heterogeneity in terms of technology.

We conduct both theoretical and quantitative analyses to explore various types of heterogeneity and it is the first attempt to use various types of heterogeneity to explain the recent dynamics of the empirical money demand curve.

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.

Panagiotis Veneris headshot

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.

More about Panagiotis

Visit Panagiotis' website

Luke Walsh headshot

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.

Zhi Yin headshot

Zhi Yin

Transformed Diffusion Models with Application to VIX and VIX Futures

Transformed diffusion models are nonlinear transformations of tractable underlying linear diffusion models that usually have closed transition density functions. Consequently, transformed diffusions are more flexible than linear diffusion but at the same time remain analytically tractable.

In this project, we extend the work of Bu et al. (2020a) and Bu et al. (2020b) by introducing a semiparametric transformed diffusion with astochastic central tendency.

It is expected that the proposed model has the advantage of having an unspecified marginal density but at the same time enjoys the benefit of a latent stochastic central tendency parameter. We apply the proposed model to the VIX and VIX future data.  

Carol Zihan Yin

Competition and Obfuscation in Financial Markets

My research interests lie at the intersection of industrial organization, applied microeconomics, and behavioural economics.

I am particularly fascinated by how firms strategically communicate with consumers using advanced textual analysis techniques.

My current research focuses on the US prepaid card market, where I closely examine the complexities of contract design and pricing dynamics.

At the core of my work is the concept of strategic obfuscation - the tactics firms employ to increase the complexity of product information. By doing so, firms aim to sway consumer decision-making and shape competitive market outcomes.

I investigate the relationship between obfuscation and competition, exploring how firms use obfuscation practices to ease competitive pressures.

By leveraging textual data, I provide novel empirical evidence that challenges conventional theoretical predictions about the link between obfuscation and pricing.

Additionally, my thesis includes a systematic review of textual complexity measures and explores the potential of large language models to assess consumer comprehension.

Through this multifaceted approach, I hope to contribute new insights to our understanding of firm-consumer interactions in financial markets, with valuable implications for policymakers and regulators