Dr Luc Bridet
Potential supervision topics
1. Incentives, motivation, and information flows in organisations. 2. Team incentives and intrinsic motivation. 3. The charity sector: evaluation and tax treatment. 4. Student motivation and the design of assessments in higher education. 5. Grade inflation and competition in the higher education sector.
Contact
Email: lb222@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Tugce Cuhadaroglu
Potential supervision topics
1. Influence procedures for interacting individuals: How do individuals influence each other’s decisions? How can we incorporate peer influence into an individual decision making framework? How can we formulate procedures that individuals use to interact with each other? 2. Influence networks: Can we identify the underlying web of influence out of observable behaviour? 3. The short-term and long-term effects of social influence on individual decision-making. 4. Boundedly-rational choice: Over the last decades many models of decision making that goes outside the standard description of rational choice has been developed to account for limitations and biases of individuals as decision makers. I am happy to work on related questions. 5. Inequality or welfare measurement: Additionally, I am interested in designing well founded measurement techniques for evaluation of inequalities or welfare related variables.
Contact
Email: tc48@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr David Escamilla-Guerrero
Potential supervision topics
1. Economic history (North America and Latin America) 19th and 20th century. Research projects aiming to understand a specific historical episode or process. 2. Migration economics: Research projects on immigrant self-selection and assimilation in the past and contemporary settings. 3. Natural experiments of history. Research projects intending to answer empirical questions in development or labor economics using quasi-experimental methods and exploiting a historical source of variation, e.g. past natural disasters, economic shocks, or policy changes. 4. Path dependence and long-run effects of historic events. Research projects aiming to study the causal effects of historic events on contemporary economic development outcomes.
Contact
Email: david.escamilla-guerrero@st-andrews.ac.uk
Prof David A. Jaeger
Potential supervision topics
1. Immigration. 2. Education. 3. Health. 4. Human capital formation. 5. Fertility and birth outcomes. 6. Terrorism and conflict. 7. Economic history.
Contact
Email: david.jaeger@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Jim Jin
Potential supervision topics
1. Dynamic market power and competition in oligopoly, either theoretical or empirical, with special interest in the relation between short-run competition efficiency and long-run growth. 2. Designing a better international agreement on climate change, focusing on the fairness in real cost allocation between developed and developing countries. 3. Economic and political justification of basic income, especially its feasibility and effectiveness in developing countries with rapid growth but severe inequality. 4. Negative aspects of free trade with imperfect competition, comparing the arguments of Ricardo and List with 21st century evidence. 5. Truth behind China’s economic growth, comparing mainstream economics with evidence and alternative explanations/theories.
Contact
Email: jyj@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Manfredi La Manna
Potential supervision topics
1. Can the Kremer-Maskin theory of globalisation explain inter-country inequality? 2. What is the optimal organisation for collaborative research and development? 3. The welfare effects of mergers in high-technology sectors. 4. The welfare analysis of alternative patent regimes. 5. The effects of alternative taxation regimes on executive incentives and behaviour.
Contact
Email: mlm@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Margaret Leighton
Potential supervision topics
1. Formation of, and returns to, general and specific human capital. 2. Labour market returns to specific features of educational curricula or education systems. 3. Horizontal education-occupation mismatch, or mismatch between individual comparative advantage and occupation tasks. 4. I am also happy to supervise students who are working with, or have recently worked with, education or development organisations, and wish to carry out doctoral-level research which includes impact evaluations of ongoing projects or interventions. I am open to discussing projects of this type around a broader range of topics including, but not limited to, education.
Contact
Email: mal22@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Irina Merkurieva
Potential supervision topics
1. Life-cycle models of labour supply and human capital investment. 2. The effect of parental education on the earnings of children. 3. Education and life-cycle labour supply. 4. Education, health and retirement. 5. Search models of informal employment.
Contact
Email: i.merkurieva@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Margherita Negri
Potential supervision topics
1. Institutions and Migration Policies. The project looks at immigration from a political economy perspective. The aim is to study the link between the institutions (e.g. electoral systems) in place in a country and the type of immigration policies it adopts. 2. Populism. What socio-economic mechanisms can drive the rise of populism? Can this be explained by a rational voting model? Under which circumstances do populist parties have incentives to enter the electoral competition? 3. Electoral Systems and Political Parties. This is a general topic that encompasses all questions related to the functioning and effects of electoral systems. Electoral systems are the rules of the electoral game that shape the behaviour of political parties and voters. 4. Causes and effects of Political Participation. This is a general topic that encompasses all questions related to voting behaviour and the decision to vote. An interesting example is the analysis of vote swapping (two voters in different constituencies choose to swap their vote): can this be sustained in equilibrium? 5. Ethnic voting. The project aims at analysing the phenomenon of ethnic voting. Broadly defined, ethnic voting is the extent to which voting decision depend on ethnic considerations. Interesting questions within this project could be: how can we best measure ethnic voting?
Contact
Email: mn48@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Lorenzo Neri
Potential supervision topics
1. The impact of local and central government programmes and policies on student educational achievement and other outcomes. 2. The role of neighbourhood programmes in shaping urban development. 3. The impact of school choice policies on households schooling decisions, student outcomes and school markets. 4. The determinants of governance decisions and management practices in the education sector and their impact on schools and students.
Contact
Email: lorenzo.neri@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Luca Savorelli
Potential supervision topics
1. The influence of cultural traits and cultural distance on the internationalisation of inventive activities. 2. Theoretical models to underpin gravity models which are used in the empirical analysis of the economics of patents. 3. The development of democratic values at school and in children. 4. Laboratory experiments related to non-monetary incentives in the workplace. 5. Culture and economic incentives.
Contact
Email: luca.savorelli@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Vibhor Saxena
Potential supervision topics
1. Structural reasons for energy inequality and poverty at the household and firm level. For e.g. discrimination, accessibility, and affordability. 2. Outcomes of energy inequality and poverty at the household and firm level. For e.g., households face health problems and firms face constraints in producing output and creating jobs. 3. Microfinance provides cheap credit to households and firms where formal credit is unavailable or is costly in poor countries. I am interested in estimating evidence for or against microfinance, considering that cheap credit can increase indebtedness due to time inconsistent preferences. For developed countries, this includes payday loans and loan sharks and their effect on households. 4. Many cultures and countries, worldwide, show preference to have sons over daughters. This effects many socioeconomic outcomes, especially demographic. I am interested in estimating the structural reasons for son preference and its outcomes. 5. Two specific outcomes (with significant spill over effects across time and space) of gender inequality across the world are nutrition and education. I am interested in conducting policy oriented impact evaluation studies to study the effect of specific variable(s) on these two outcomes.
Contact
Email: vs57@st-andrews.ac.uk
Prof Ian Smith
Potential supervision topics
1. The economics of the family, including partnership formation and dissolution 2. The economics of religious markets and religious behaviour 3. The economics of nudges 4. The economics of sexual behaviour 5. The economics of laws, norms and social preferences
Contact
Email: is@st-andrews.ac.uk
Prof Conny Wollbrant
Potential supervision topics
Lab and field experiments on judgement and decision making (e.g., prosocial behaviour, forecasting accuracy). Field and online experiments on global challenges (e.g., climate change, cyber security, antimicrobial resistance, spread of infectious disease) and human forecasting of intervention effects. Registered Replication Reports of especially significant studies.
Contact
Email: conny.wollbrant@st-andrews.ac.uk
Dr Min Zhang
Potential supervision topics
1. How different types of information structures affect the behavioural implications of social learning. 2. How information aggregates in sequential markets through public observables and the implication on trading outcomes. 3. How (anti-)transparent public information policy affects social learning and thus social welfare. 4. How to design dynamic trading mechanisms in sequential markets with learning. 5. How different type of behavioural assumptions or bounded rationalities affect social learning.
Contact
Email: mz47@st-andrews.ac.uk