pathway: Economics

My research is about applied microeconomics, especially on health economics. The aim of my PhD research is to discover the causal relationship between the parental mental health and the children’s health care utilization among the families. In the meantime, my research will also focus on the parental mental health influence on child development.

My research involves modelling economies to capture heterogeneities between households.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of wealth held by a minority of agents that benefitted from intergenerational wealth and education was redistributed. Workers became more productive, and economies began accumulating capital. As households became wealthier, economic inequalities narrowed, yet heterogeneity remained – not all were equal in labour market skills nor had equal access to financial markets.

It seems clear that if heterogeneities are ubiquitous in economies, serious dynamic models should account for these.

My research will provide evidence to formally assess claims which suggest that new media platforms have contributed to the increasing radicalisation and polarisation of political thought in modern society. Recent advances in machine learning will be used in conjunction with models from empirical industrial organisation in order to model both the supply and demand side of these platforms. It is hoped that this work will have implications well beyond academia, as a basis for discussion about whether and how new media should be subjected to further regulations.

I am yet to confirm my exact research topic however the research area of my interest lies in Macroeconomics. More importantly, I would like to research the relationship between technical changes and unemployment.

My research will provide evidence on whether parents in England value academic quality when choosing between state-schools, which is necessary for the mechanism of school choice to improve academic standards. I will explore the effects of school choice on social and ethnic segregation across schools, and simulate how this would change under alternative admissions criteria for schools that move away from the typical distance based criteria, accounting for residential preferences. I will also explore the causal effect of school quality on future attainment, by comparing the outcomes for children that are marginally accepted and rejected from their preferred school.

I am yet to confirm my exact research topic however I am most interested in looking at individual and group behaviour and how these relate to economic outcomes. As part of my Masters dissertation I plan to conduct an experiment looking at why many people choose to cooperate and behave in ways that do not, at least initially, appear to be in their best interests. More specifically, the role of shame related to knowing that others will observe what actions one has made and how this might interact with the long studied role of communication possibilities in such situations.