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 impact of organized crime on Italian economic social mobility patterns: education, labour market patterns and quality of institutions

My research aims to contribute to the creation of an analytical framework capturing the overall impact of organized crime on social mobility patterns of the population living in an infiltrated environment, starting from the Italian context.

This research addresses the following questions: what is organized crime’s impact on the opportunities of the population affected by its presence? How does organized crime affect educational pathways and job aspirations? How does it impact local governments’ development funds?

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.

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.

Boju Li headshot

Boju Li

My research focuses on the areas of how government policies affect economic growth and other macroeconomic variables, such as wealth distribution, income inequality and unemployment.

The project aims to combine theoretical and empirical analysis of economic growth models.

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?

Image of a blank silhouette with white background

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.

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Yuchen Su

The welfare-increasing of financial transaction tax in Asian.

The financial transaction tax is a proportional tax on financial transactions, which was first proposed by Tobin (1978). Due to the financial transaction tax, agents cost more to readjust their portfolios of liquid and illiquid assets in response to liquidity shocks.

Financial transaction taxes might be against the market, but many countries have introduced them. Why did those countries introduce the financial transaction tax? Does the transaction tax benefit those countries?

The research aims to address whether financial transaction tax in the secondary bond market can be welfare-increasing. My research is based on Lagos and Wright (2005).

My studies analyse the welfare implications of financial transaction tax and offer the underlying frictions that give rise to the need for financial transactions.

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

Terms and Conditions Apply: An Empirical Analysis of Contractual Terms in the U.S. household finance market

My research interests are focused on Applied Microeconomics and Empirical Industrial Organization.

In my doctoral thesis, I am utilizing unstructured data to create new measures of economic activity and behaviour. Specifically, I am exploring the US prepaid card market, with a focus on contract design and pricing.

Through my research, I aim to provide empirical evidence that can inform economic decision-making and contribute to the development of innovative solutions in organizational economics and household finance.