September 2016
LSE appoints Economics alumna Dame Minouche Shafik as its new Director from September 2017
Minouche Shafik (pictured, source: DFID-UK Department for International Development), one of the Bank of England's deputy governors and an alumna of the Department (MSc in Economics), will become the School's new Director from 1 September 2017.
She is the first woman to be appointed to the position on a permanent basis and LSE’s 16th Director overall.
She is currently Deputy Governor of the Bank of England where she is a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, the Financial Policy Committee, and the Board of the Prudential Regulation Authority.
Previously she served as Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development, and Vice-President of the World Bank. She has taught at the Wharton Business School and Georgetown University and published on a wide array of topics in economics and international development.
Minouche held academic appointments at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Economics Department at Georgetown University. She has a BA in Economics and Politics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and a DPhil in Economics from St. Antony's College, Oxford University. She has published a number of books and articles on a wide variety of economic topics.
Minouche Shafik says, “I am thrilled to be given the opportunity to lead the LSE. The School’s long tradition of bringing the best of social science research and teaching to bear on the problems of the day is needed now more than ever. LSE is a unique institution that combines intellectual excellence and global reach. I am looking forward to working with both staff and students to guide it through what will be a time of challenge and opportunity in the higher education sector.”
For more information, please visit the LSE News and Media pages.
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The Department welcomes Professor Stephen Machin
Professor Stephen Machin (pictured left) joins the department as Professor of Economics. He will also be the new Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE.
Professor Machin has been Researcher Director at the CEP since 20013 and Professor of Economics at University College London since 1996. He is one of the world’s leading economists in fields as diverse as education, labour, inequality, crime and firm performance. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Society for Labour Economics.
For further information please see the CEP Press Release.
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August 2016
PhD alumnus awarded the Hicks-Tinbergen medal 2016 by EEA
Riccardo Puglisi (pictured, copyright: Niccolo Caranti CC-BY-SA-3.0), PhD in Economics 2008, has been awarded, together with James Snyder, the European Economic Association's Hicks-Tinbergen medal 2016 for their paper 'The Balanced US Press'.
This paper proposes a novel methodology for measuring ideological bias by newspapers. The key insight is that ballot propositions can be used to compare newspaper endorsements with the ex-post votes received by the proposition at the polls. Newspapers that disagree with a majority of the voters on a proposition reveal to be to the left or to the right of the median voter: if a newspaper keeps endorsing left-wing issues that lose at the polls, the newspaper is called left-wing. By averaging over multiple propositions the authors estimate an index of conservatism for each newspaper. Their results contrast with existing evidence that measured media bias by locating newspapers relative to one another or to politicians. While previous evidence had suggested that newspapers
exhibited a leftward bias, the current paper finds that on average newspapers are located at the median voter in their states. Interestingly, differences emerge across issues, with newspapers being more liberal than voters on social issues, and more conservative on
economic issues.
For further information, please visit the EEA website.
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July 2016
Professor Robin Burgess elected Fellow of the British Academy
At its Annual General Meeting on 14 July, the British Academy elected 42 distinguished UK academics as Fellows, in recognition of their outstanding contribution to research. Their research areas span the breadth of the humanities and social sciences, including law, linguistics, economics and history. Four LSE professors have been elected as Fellows.
Professor Robin Burgess (pictured left), Professor of Economics at the Department and Director of the International Growth Centre, has been elected as British Academy Fellow in recognition of his outstanding research on applied economics: development economics, environmental and energy economics, microeconomics of growth, political economy, public economics and labour economics.
Professor of Economics, Director of the IGC and a member of STICERD, Robin Burgess, said: "Never has the process of linking economic research with public policy been more necessary in the interconnected world we inhabit. I look forward to working with the British Academy in this exciting endeavour."
In addition to the UK Fellows, the British Academy elected 20 new Corresponding Fellows from overseas universities in the US, Australia, Spain and Germany as well as four Honorary Fellows.
Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of Economics at LSE and Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, is stepping down as President of the British Academy after four years. His successor is Professor Sir David Cannadine.
For further information please visit the British Academy website and the LSE News and Media pages.
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Royal Economic Society Junior Fellowship Awards 2016-2017
Congratulations to our research students: Florian Blum, Stephan Maurer and Guo Xu, who have been awarded Junior Fellowships for 2016-2017 from the Royal Economic Society.
Since 1995, the Society has invited UK universities to nominate economics students for one-year junior research fellowships.
This year, the RES received 47 applications for this increasingly popular scheme from 18 universities (Birkbeck, Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Essex, Lancaster, Leicester, Loughborough, LSE, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford, Reading, RHUL, Sheffield, Sussex, UCL and Warwick). Those awarded a Junior Fellowship grant will be also invited to both attend the RES Annual Conference at the end of their research year and submit a research paper to the RES Conference Programme Chair for possible inclusion in an RES Junior Fellowship conference session.
Congratulations to the ten successful Junior Fellowships candidates and among them our research students:
Florian Blum (pictured left) - Food For Thought: Nutrition and Agricultural Technology
Stephan E Maurer (pictured right) - Voting Behaviour and public employment in Nazi Germany
Guo Xu (pictured left) - How Does Collective Reputation Affect Hiring? Selection and Sorting in an Online Labour Market
For further information, please visit the Royal Economic Society website.
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European Research Council Consolidator Grants for Professors at the Department
Professor Ricardo Reis, Department of Economics and Centre for 
Macroeconomics, has been awarded an European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the INFL project. The project pursues an alternative approach which examines the causes and effects of inflation from the perspective of the value of financial assets.
Professor Henrik Kleven, Department of 
Economics and STICERD, has been awarded an European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the DEPP project. The project aims to achieve a comprehensive understanding of how government interventions affect two key markets: the housing market and the labour market.
Professor Silvana Tenreyro, Department of Economics and Centre for Macroeconomics, has been awarded an European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the MACROTRADE project. The project will study macroeconomic fluctuations, identify the mechanisms that drive and propagate these fluctuations, and use the empirical findings to formulate models used for quantitative policy and positive analysis.
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The Department welcomes Professor Nava Ashraf
Professor Nava Ashraf (pictured left) joins the 
department as Professor of Economics. She will also be the Research Director of the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship. As the Research Director she will lead the Institute’s effort to imbue private action for the public good with the science that illuminates how to maximize its impact.
Nava Ashraf received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University, where she was an Assistant and Later Associate Professor from 2005 to 2016. She is also Lead Academic for Zambia at International Growth Centre (IGC), a Fellow at BREAD and NBER as well as Affiliated Professor at MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Professor Ashraf’s research combines psychology and economics, using both lab and field experiments to test insights from behavioural economics in the context of global development in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. She has pioneered the concept of altruistic capital, a way of harnessing every individual's intrinsic desire to make a positive social impact. Her recent field experiments on health services delivery and educational investment have been carried out jointly with the Ministries of Health and Education in Zambia, using a model of co-generation of knowledge.
Professor Ashraf’s research is published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
For further information about Nava Ashraf's appointment at the Marshall Institute, please visit the LSE News and Media pages.
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I G Patel Chair will be supported by India's YES BANK
Mumbai-based YES BANK, India’s fifth largest private sector Bank, has pledged one million pounds to the LSE to support the IG Patel Chair– named in honour of the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and former Director of LSE.
(Pictured left to right: Dr Ruth Kattumuri, Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Mr Rana Kapoor, Professor Robin Mansell, Mr Amit Shah)
Mr Rana Kapoor, Founder, Managing Director & CEO of YES BANK, signed an agreement with the LSE Deputy Director and Provost Professor Robin Mansell in London today, pledging ten years of funding for the Chair which will be held initially by Professor Lord Nicholas Stern.
A former Chief Economist of the World Bank, with four decades of experience working with India, Lord Stern has been the IG Patel Chair of Economics and Government since its creation in 2007.
The funding from YES BANK will also support the work of the LSE India Observatory, which had been set up in 2007 to continue to develop and enhance research and programmes related to India's economy, politics and society.
Lord Nicholas Stern, I G Patel Professor (pictured left), said:
“Support from YES BANK will ensure that the India Observatory continues both its research and its work to build public understanding on the Indian economy and society. Our two institutions share a common commitment to analysing and tackling societal challenges, with a strong focus on climate change and sustainability. I would like to thank Mr Rana Kapoor and YES BANK for their generosity.”
For further information about the partnership, please visit the LSE News and Media pages. For information on the I G Patel Chair please visit the Named Chairs of the Department page.
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June 2016
July issue of Economica Journal
The third issue (number 83, issue 331, July 2016) of the Department's house journal, Economica, is out this week.
The contents of this issue include:
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Saints Marching In, 1590-2012, by Robert J Barro and Rachel M McCleary
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Subjective Expectations and Income Processes in Rural India, by Orazio Attanasio and Britta Augsburg
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Read Rigidities and Nominal Price Changes, by Peter J Klenow and Jonathan L Willis
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Growth and Violence: Arguement for a Per Capita Measure of Civil War, by Hannes Mueller
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Does the Federal Reserve have Private Information about its Future Actions? by Bedri Kamil Onur Taş
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'For Richer, For Poorer': Assortative Mating and Savings Preferences, by Luc Arrondel and Nicolas Frémeaux
To submit a paper to Economica go to the online submission page.
For further information about the journal, please visit the Economica webpage on the departmental website.
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May 2016
Dr Camille Landais awarded an ERC Starting Grant
Dr Camille Landais, Department of Economics and STICERD, has been awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for the DYNAMICSS project. The key idea of DYNAMICSS is to extend the sufficient statistics (SS) approach to dynamic settings and characterize the full time profile, rather than the average generosity, of social insurance and transfer policies. By expressing optimal policy as a function of a limited set of statistics, the SS approach has the advantage of making clear the trade-offs implied in optimal tax or benefit formulae and of tightly integrating the theory and the empirics of optimal policy analysis, to offer robust policy guidance.
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Professor Alan Manning received ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative funding
Professor Alan Manning, Department of Economics and Centre for Economic Performance, has received funding under the Economic and Social Research Council's Secondary Data Analysis Initiative to develop a better understanding of the impact of economic opportunity on migration and through this to understand the persistence of regional inequalities in the UK (often summarized as the 'NorthSouth' divide) and to develop policies that might help to alleviate the problems.
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Economics PhD student awarded IOEA 2016 Best Research Paper Award
Congrulations to Miguel Espinosa, PhD Student and Teaching Fellow at the Department and affiliate of STICERD, who has received the IOEA 2016 Best Research Paper Award.
Every year, the Institutional and Organizational Economics Academy (IOEA) (ex-ESNIE) awards prizes to the best projects in the field. The prize aims recognizing promising young scholars and projects. The winner of the first prize has been given to Miguel Espinosa this year.
The IOEA has become one of the most prominent events in research on institutional and organizational economics in the world. The Academy aims to promote advanced and original research on institutional and organizational economics. It combines theoretical and empirical analyses of the diversity of mechanisms, formal and informal, allowing coordination between agents, interaction between these different mechanisms and their consequences on economic performances and dynamics.
Beyond the will to promote IOE research, another major target of the academy is to foster its development among young researchers, to identify promising talents, and to spread their work within the community. PhD candidates, Post-doc, as well as young professors, benefit from both a high-level training and a chance to fit into the international network of the IOE.
More information is available from the IOEA and the SIOE websites.
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LSE Teaching Awards 2016
Congratulations to all our teachers who were honoured by LSE at the LSESU Teaching Excellence Awards Celebration!
The Student Led Teaching Excellence Awards recognise those who have made a difference to the students time at LSE.
LSESU Teaching Excellence Award Winner in Feedback and Communication to Francesco Ruggieri (Economics, current MSc Economics)
"Francesco is the definition of a teacher who goes the extra mile to explain course content, using intuition and extra diagrammatic analysis, so that everyone in the class feels totally comfortable. He's repeatedly provided detailed follow ups to topics that have been discussed in class and created extensive study notes on challenging topics. He leaves feedback that is so in-depth and supportive that there's no residual ambiguity."
LSESU Highly Commended Awards in Innovative Teaching to Joanna Lewis (International History) and Aleksander Kloda (Economics, alumnus of BSc EME and MSc Economics)
LSE Class Teacher Awards
Class Teacher Awards are nominated by academic departments in recognition of the special contribution made by graduate teaching assistants, teaching fellows and guest teachers to their work.
Economics Class Teachers awarded:
Shan Aman-Rana, Clement Minaudier, Kilian Russ, Thomas Drechsel, Frank Pisch
(Honourable mentions to Tiloka De Silva, Giulia Giupponi, Aleksander Kloda, Luis Martinez, William Matcham, Maria Molina-Domene, Revi Panidha, Alessano Stoza, Ken Starling, Luke Taylor)
For further information please visit the LSE TLC pages.
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Volunteering Awards for Economics Students
Congratulations to our BSc Economics students Chris Fairley and Dumisani Gwakuba for being honoured by LSE for their volunteering activities!
Economics student Chris Fairley has been named LSE’s 2016 Volunteer of the Year for his “enormous contribution” to support both human and animal rights as well as his work to help create an AIDS-free world.
Chris, 19, (pictured left) was chosen from 30 nominees for the award, announced at the LSE Volunteers annual celebratory ceremony on 28 April.
His voluntary work in the past year has included roles with all four of LSESU Amnesty International’s campaign weeks, running the student union’s Animal Rights Society, founding LSE’s Youth Stop AIDS contingent and helping to organise events during LSE Student Volunteering Week.
Accepting the award, Chris said:
“LSE’s volunteering community is both incredible and inspiring. It’s amazing to see so many talented and dedicated people working to improve the world around them. It’s been a privilege to work on causes that mean a lot to me with some of the most creative and passionate people I’ve ever met.”
Fellow BSc Economics student Dumisani Gwakuba, 22, (pictured left with LSE Volunteer Co-ordinator David Coles) won the inaugural Outstanding Contribution to the LSE Community Award for his work as an LSE peer supporter at Bankside House.
“A lot of this work is not always visible to staff and other students,” his nominator Debra Ogden said.
“While our other peer supporters have done a great job, Dumisani’s enthusiasm and initiative has stood out this year. He is a real asset to the LSE community,” Debra said.
Accepting the award, Dumisani said:
“I am honoured and humbled to receive this award, and this has encouraged me to continue giving back as a Peer Supporter. This award is also dedicated to the rest of the Peer Supporters who continue to give back to the LSE community and consistently aim to make LSE a better place for all students. Hopefully this will encourage many others at LSE to pursue altruistic endeavours. My advice for students is that volunteering is not only an enriching experience but also one of the first steps to making the world a better place for all.”
For further information about the LSE volunteering awards, please visit the LSE News pages.
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April 2016
Professor Gilat Levy awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant
Professor Gilat Levy has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the BPI project. The project aims to provide a new framework to model and analyse dynamics of group beliefs, in order to study phenomena such as group polarisation, segregation and inter-group discrimination. It will introduce and study a new heuristic for the diffusion of beliefs in groups, the Bayesian Peer Influence heuristic (BPI), based on the idea that individuals learn their peers’ beliefs and update their own beliefs using a simple formula. The project will study the properties of the BPI and its applications to the dynamics of group behaviour.
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Dr David Baqaee awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant
Dr David Baqaee has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to empirically identify which industries are systemically important to the economy. The project will combine the theoretical model of Baqaee (2015) with a rich, panel dataset of Japanese firms and will develop new econometric methods for estimating a measure of systemic importance that depends on how many important upstream and downstream connections are severed by the loss of a firm.
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March 2016
April issue of Economica Journal
The second issue (issue 330 for April 2016) of the Department's house journal, Economica, is out this week.
The contents of this issue include:
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Coase Lecture - Human Capital, Inequality and Tax Reform: Recent Past and Future Prospects, by Richard Blundell
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Why Can Modern Governmen Tax So Much? An Agency Model of Firms as Fiscal Intermediaries, by Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Emmanuel Saez
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Shopping Around: How Households Adjusted Food Spending Over the Great Recession, by Rachel Griffith, Martin O'Connell and Kate Smith
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The Rising Postgraduate Wage Premium, by Joanne Lindley and Stephen Machin
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Predicateble Recoveries, by Xiaoming Cai, Wouter J. Den Haan and Jonathan Pinder
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Intra-industry trade: A Krugman-Ricardo Model and Data, by Kwok Tong Soo
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The Impact of Government Debt, Expenditure
and Taxes on Aggregate Investment and
Productivity Growth, by Simone Salotti and
Carmine Trecroci
To access the articles, please visit Economica's page. To submit a paper to Economica go to the online submission page.
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February 2016
Economics PhD student awarded funding from MIT
Congratulations to Florian Blum, PhD Student at the Department and affiliate of STICERD, who has been awarded funding from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to investigate the effect of central price-cap regulation on the quantity and price of service provision within the public services.
The project will also estimate the optimal price-cap that maximises consumer welfare.
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January 2016
January issue of Economica Journal
We are pleased to announce that the Department’s house journal, Economica, has been re-launched.
The Editorial Team comprises Oriana Bandiera, Tim Besley, Francesco Caselli, Maitreesh Ghatak, Steve Machin, Ian Martin, Gianmarco Ottaviano and John Van Reenen, all of whom are handling new submissions.
The contents of the January issue are:
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Education as Liberation? by Willa Friedman, Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel and Rebecca Thornton
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A General Equilibrium Analysis of Personal Bankruptcy Law by Ulf Von Lilienfeld-Toal and Dilip Mookherjee
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Information and Enforcement in Informal Credit Markets by Parikshit Ghosh and Debraj Ray
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The Slow Growth of New Plants: Learning about Demand? by Lucia Foster, John Haltiwanger and Chad Syverson
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Spatial Asset Pricing: A First Step by François Ortalo-Magné and Andrea Prat
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Does Competition Solve the Hold-up Problem? by Leonardo Felli and Kevin Roberts
The journal offers a quick turnaround time and aims to publish well-crafted papers of general interest across a range of fields. To submit a paper to Economica go to the online submission page.
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New Year Honours at LSE
LSE would like to congratulate all staff, former staff and alumni recognised in the 2016 New Year Honours. In particular, the Department of Economics would also like to congratulate its alumni who have been been recognised!
Philip S Mason OBE, BSc Economics 1980, Order of the British Empire for services to International Anti-Corruption Policy.
Sir David R Norgrove, MSc (Econ) Economics 1972, has been knighted for services to the low paid and the family justice system.
For more information please visit the LSE News pages.
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Dr Pasquale Schiraldi awarded an ESRC research grant
Dr Pasquale Schiraldi has been awarded an ESRC research grant for his project "Simultaneous First-Price Auctions with Preferences over Combinations". The research aims to establish a new set of methods for theoretical and empirical analysis of simultaneous multi-object auctions; to contribute to the debate about the desirability of different auction designs in procurement auctions; and to evaluate the costs and benefits of different auction designs. Dr Tatiana Komarova and Dr Matthew Gentry are co-investigators on the project.
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December 2015
Lord Nicholas Stern to chair national review of university research
Professor Lord Nicholas Stern will lead a UK-wide review to ensure future university research funding is allocated more efficiently and linked to widespread public impact.
The review, announced today by Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson, follows the Government’s decision last month to protect the £4.7 billion science and research budget in real terms during this Parliament.
It will take forward the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the new system introduced in 2014 for assessing the quality of research carried out in 154 UK universities.
Responding to the announcement, Nick Stern said:
“Research assessment is a vital element in promoting the excellence of UK universities’ research, which we must continue to nurture. It is one of our country’s greatest assets and it is essential our research remains fit for purpose, is efficient, and carries the confidence of the UK research community.
“Research excellence must remain the central basis for allocating support and funding to universities and we will explore ways in which a simpler system for the REF might be developed,” Lord Stern said.
Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson said:
“Lord Stern is a renowned academic with experience of working at the highest levels of government and I am delighted that he has agreed to lead this review. He and the members of the steering group will bring a valuable spectrum of expertise to the review.”
International benchmarking has shown that past research assessment exercises have improved the quality of UK research. Lord Stern is expected to deliver his review of the REF to the government in the summer of 2016.
Further information is available from the LSE News and Media pages.
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November 2015
2015 John Hicks Prize for an Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation
The Department of Economics is pleased to announce that the inaugural John Hicks Prize for an Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation is awarded jointly to Reka Juhasz and Claudia Steinwender in 2015.
Both use original historical datasets to look at important questions.
Reka studies (pictured left) the impact of temporary trade protection from a technological leader on the long-term development of follower nations using evidence from 19th century Europe.
Claudia (pictured right) studies the impact of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 on the cotton trade. Their work shows ambition and skill as well as delivering memorable results with persuasive research designs and, in the opinion of the committee, are fully deserving of the inaugural Hicks prize.
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Professor John Van Reenen awarded an ERC Advanced Grant
Professor John Van Reenen, Professor of Economics at the Department and Director of the Centre for Economic Performance, has been awarded an European Research Council Advanced Grant for the GGTMI project. The project will examine ways to increase European growth through technological and managerial innovation. The technological innovation aspect is focused on examining the lifecycle of innovators and entrepreneurs across several advanced countries, and the impact of financial constraints, tax and schooling policies on stimulating greater innovation. The second theme will examine by how much managerial practices can account for differences in the wealth of nations and how management quality can be improved, focusing on randomized control trials of business support polices.
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Professor Martin Pesendorfer elected Fellow of the Econometric Society
We are pleased to announce that Professor Martin Pesendorfer has been elected Fellow of the Econometric Society.
Founded in 1930, the Econometric Society is the foremost international society fostering the study and application of quantitative economics. It publishes three leading econometrics journals, as well as a research monograph series, conducts numerous congresses, conferences and seminars, and promotes the diffusion of knowledge about recent developments in quantitative economics around the world via its regional groups.
Professor Martin Pesendorfer has been at the Department of Economics for more than 10 years. He is the MRes/PhD Programme Director and the Coordinator of the European Doctoral Programme at LSE. He is associate of the Economics of Industry Programme at STICERD, LSE and a research affiliate at the CEPR, a research fellow at the NBER, and member of the editorial board of the Review of Economic Studies.
For further information please visit the Econometric Society's news page.
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Professor Tim Besley elected Second Vice President of the Econometric Society
We are delighted to announce that Professor Tim Besley has been elected Second Vice-President of the Econometric Society, replacing Drew Fudenberg of Harvard. His election means that he will serve as President of the Econometric Society in 2018.
Founded in 1930, the Econometric Society is the foremost international society fostering the study and application of quantitative economics. It publishes three leading econometrics journals, as well as a research monograph series, conducts numerous congresses, conferences and seminars, and promotes the diffusion of knowledge about recent developments in quantitative economics around the world via its regional groups.
Tim Besley, who holds the Sir William Arthur Lewis Chair, has been a member of the Economics Department for 20 years. An external member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee from September 2006 to August 2009, he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the British Academy, and the European Economic Association, as well as a foreign honorary member of the American Economic Association and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Speaking of his election, Tim said, “It is a great honour to have been elected to serve as President of the Econometric Society in 2018. The Society has played a key role in transforming our discipline and has global reach. By being elected to this role, I will also continue LSE’s strong links to the Econometric Society.”
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Professor Tim Besley appointed as a commissioner on the National Infrastructure Commission
The government has launched a National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) to oversee £100bn of spending on infrastructure projects, such as road, rail flood defences, and other vital projects. Led by former Cabinet minister Lord Adonis, the Commission will produce a report at the start of each five-year Parliament, offering recommendations for priority infrastructure projects.
Professor Tim Besley will serve as one of the seven commissioners charged with producing a report at the start of each five-year Parliament, offering recommendations for priority infrastructure projects. Its initial focus will be in three key areas. These are:
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northern connectivity, particularly identifying priorities for future investment in the North’s strategic transport infrastructure to improve connectivity between cities, especially east-west across the Pennines
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London’s transport system, particularly reviewing strategic options and identifying priorities for future investment in large scale transport improvements – on road, rail and underground – including Crossrail 2
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energy, particularly exploring how the UK can better balance supply and demand, aiming for an energy market where prices are reflective of costs to the overall system.
Tim Besley, who holds the Sir William Arthur Lewis Chair, has been a member of the Economics Department for 20 years. An external member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee from September 2006 to August 2009, he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the British Academy, and the European Economic Association, as well as a foreign honorary member of the American Economic Association and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
For further information please visit the HM Treasury's pages.
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2015 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2015 to
Angus Deaton, Princeton University, NJ, USA
"for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare".
Statement from the LSE Department of Economics congratulating Angus Deaton on his Nobel Prize
On behalf of the LSE Department of Economics I would like to congratulate Angus Deaton on his Nobel Prize in Economics. Angus is the economist who has most fundamentally advanced our understanding of consumption, poverty and welfare over the past half century. His early, path breaking work on the economics of consumer behavior and its link to aggregate consumption patterns was followed by seminal work looking at the links between income and consumption, poverty and intra-household allocation using household data in developing countries. Taken together his work has transformed not only academic research in economics but also how we think about policies to affect consumption, poverty and welfare both at the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels.
Robin Burgess
Professor of Economics and Director, International Growth Centre
Department of Economics
LSE
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Inger Munk
We are sad to announce that Inger Munk, a former PhD student in the Economics Department who was based in STICERD died in a hiking accident on October 2nd leaving behind two young children. Inger was always a cheery presence in STICERD and a dedicated researcher with strong interests in public policy questions. Since leaving LSE, she became an expert in offshore wind technology and had recently started her own consulting business. Our sympathies go to her family and friends at this difficult time.
Tim Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak
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September 2015
Dr Johannes Spinnewijn awarded the Willey Prize in Economics by the British Academy
On 29 September the British Academy announced the winners of its 2015 prizes and medals, which were formally celebrated at the British Academy's annual awards ceremony on the same date.
The annual Wiley Prize in Economics, made in partnership with Wiley-Blackwell, rewards achievement in research for an outstanding early career economist. The prize is a sum of £5,000. Dr Johannes Spinnewijn is the 2015 winner for his academic excellence in the field of economics, in particular his research in current and topical public policy.
Professor Leonardo Felli, Head of the Department of Economics, said: "On behalf of the entire Department of Economics, it is a real pleasure to congratulate our colleague Johannes Spinnewijn, whose outstanding work in public policy has today been recognised by the British Academy, in their decision to award him the 2015 Wiley Prize in Economics."
Dr Spinnewijn said: “I am greatly honoured to receive this prize and very happy with the recognition of my work in public economics. It is an exciting field to be in today and a joy trying to contribute to it at LSE.”
Further information is available from the British Academy News and Prizes pages.
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Economics PhD Student awarded RES 2015 Junior Fellowship Award
Nicola Limodio, PhD student at the Department of Economics and an affiliate of STICERD, has received a Junior Fellowship research award for the academic year 2015-2016 for his research: The Economics of Development Lending: Evidence from Manager-Country Assignment in World Bank Projects.
The 2015 Junior Fellowship award scheme received 40 applications from a variety of UK universities (including Birkbeck, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Essex, Glasgow, Imperial, Leicester, LSE, Manchester, Oxford, Portsmouth, St Andrews, UCL, York and Warwick).
5 elected Council members assessed and graded the applications and the RES Secretary General made the final awards. This year 16 candidates were selected for awards with 12 offers made.
Further information about the RES Fellowships is available via the pages.
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News Archive