Ceren Ozgen
Ceren Ozgen is a visiting senior fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Green Skills Lab at LSE.
She is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Birmingham working on topics in labour, urban and environmental economics. She holds a PhD in Economics from VU Amsterdam and has held visiting positions at University College London, the London School of Economics and Waikato University New Zealand. She has been awarded a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellowship from the European Commission and is a IZA research fellow.
Background
Ceren Ozgen is an applied economist who works at the intersection of labour and urban economics. Her work brings together three forces reshaping modern economies—technology, high-skilled migration, and the green transition—to understand how they jointly affect workers, firms and cities. At the centre of her research lies one unifying question: how do technological shifts reallocate opportunity, skill demand, and inequality across people, place, and firms?
She has published extensively on innovation, technological change, and the role of (green) skills in shaping labour market outcomes, including for immigrants and urban growth, to understand of how technological change drives economic performance and structural transformation. Her research combines large-scale administrative datasets with state-of-the-art empirical methods, and more recently incorporates unstructured AI-generated data to capture emerging patterns in labour markets and technological change.
Since 2024, she has collaborated with Keio University in Japan to develop and integrate green-jobs-specific questions into the Japanese Labour Force Survey, and to evaluate the resulting survey outcomes; advancing the measurement of labour market adjustment in the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Her research has informed debates at organisations such as the OECD, Council of Europe and the European Commission and has been featured in international media including The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times, and The Conversation, VoxEU, The Register (40 million readers worldwide), French online media Reaction Atlántico.
She is a scientific committee member of the European Pool of Employment and Labour Market of Experts, DG EMPL European Commission (2024-2028); selected member of ESRC Assessor College (2025- 2028) and Member of Royal Economic Society Peer Learning Sets Facilitator.
Research interests
- Future of work: automation, skills, and labour market inequality
- Green transition: environmental policy, green jobs, and wage dynamics
- Migration and diversity: innovation, productivity, and refugee integration