Department News

Warwick Economics Alumna wins Investment Woman of the Year

Caroline Escott, a Warwick Economics alumna, has won the Investment Week "Investment Woman of the Year (Small/Medium Firms)" Award in recognition of her work leading on investment and ESG policy at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association and for coordinating the Association’s work on Diversity & Inclusion.

Caroline graduating from the University of Warwick with a degree in Economics, Politics and International Studies in 2006. We caught up with her to ask about her award in an interview with her.

CEPR Research Fellow

Mark Harrison has been made a research fellow for The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). CEPR was founded in 1983 to enhance the quality of economic policy-making within Europe and beyond, by fostering high quality, policy-relevant economic research and disseminating it widely to decision-makers in the public and private sectors.

Warwick Internship Scheme for Economists (WISE)

We are looking for staff to propose research-based, teaching-based or administrative-based projects in which you are looking for student help. This scheme is available for all staff from within the Department to propose projects and these projects will be funded out of the Department budget which has been set aside. The scheme aims to provide opportunities for our UG and PGT students to further enhance their employability skills by engaging in these projects identified in the Department.

It is worth noting that we have had a lot of interest for the projects of Term 1 from top quality students. However due to the insufficient number of projects, we were unable to place them. You will find further details of the scheme on the WISE webpage.

If you have project proposal, please fill in an online form. If you need further support, please contact one of the WISE Co-ordinators for 19/20 projects:

• Vasiliki Dimakopoulou (for Research and Teaching projects)
• Bozena Beauclair (for Administrative projects)

To request project support, please submit your project proposal by 31 January 2020 via the online form.

Administration Assistant (CAGE) Vacancy

A new Administration Assistant position has been advertised recently to work within the CAGE team. This role is being offered on a part-time basis. Informal enquiries can be forwarded to Jane Snape (Jane.Snape@warwick.ac.uk) in the first instance.

Please note the closing date is 26 January 2020.

Exam Success

Stephanie Caven – Finance Officer – has been awarded the CIMA Diploma in Management Accounting – well done Stephanie!

Departmental Recognition Scheme - 2020

The following individuals were recognised through the Recognition Scheme in January: Natalie Deven and Rosie Narayan – Congratulations to both.

Pulse Staff Survey 2020

Thank you so much to those of you who have taken part in the Pulse Staff Survey 2020. Your views and opinions are important to the University and the Department and can shape the way in which we all work. The survey is anonymised and the closing date is 2 Feb 2020.

We are currently at 64%, please take ten minutes out of your very busy day to complete the survey and let’s see this number increase!!

Our Community Values

At the Departmental meeting on Wednesday 15th January, Bozena presented an infographic highlighting current strategic priorities for the Department (see image to the right) which will be displayed on a wall in the entrance foyer as well as our website. Lisa presented suggestions for our Community Values as follows:

• Respect – We treat everyone with dignity and respect.
• Integrity - We are guided by the principles of integrity, fostering an open and positive environment which is inclusive to all.
• Accountability - We all have a personal responsibility and commitment to these values.

Our Expectations:

• We all display professionalism in our conduct
• We create a safe environment for work and study
• We do not tolerate inappropriate behaviour such as sexual misconduct, verbal, online and social media abuse.
• We understand that every role is important to our success
• We all build a community in which there is mutual respect and all staff and students can reach their full potential.

“We” means all of us, students and staff alike.

If you have further questions about the above, please contact Lisa and Bozena respectively.

Publications, Presentations & Workshops

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Jonathan Cave has the following updates:

• his Turing Fellowship has been renewed, and he will continue to serve on the Data Ethics Group and the Ethics Advisory Group.
• has responded to the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation’s consultation on a Framework for the ethical development and use of data analytics tools in policing.
• will be speaking and participating in a panel as part of the Geovation/Benchmark initiative on ethical application of geospatial data “The map is not the territory: representation, bias & inequity” on Wednesday 15 January.
• will participate on the Regulatory Policy Committee 10th Anniversary event at the House of Lords, which includes 2 papers he co-authored; “A decade of regulatory scrutiny” and “Impact assessment: Fit for what purpose?” on 23rd January,
• is speaking at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on implications of data analytics and machine learning for the regulation of small businesses and the future of work on 27th January.
• the University of Warwick will be hosting a 2-dayworkshop of the mConsulting Project (Mobile consulting as an option for communities with minimal healthcare access in low-resource settings, specifically Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania), at which he will speak and lead a session on 30th and 31st January
• co-authored a paper on “The Quest for Broadly Acceptable Architecture for Data Governance: A Human-Machine Conviviality Approach” with Jiro KOKURYO, David FARBER, Hiroaki MIYATA, Jun MURAI, Takehiro OHYA, and Tatsuhiko YAMAMOTO (of the Cyber Civilization Research Center in the Keio University Global Research Institute) – to be jointly published as a TWERP.

Dennis Novy presented research seminars: “Exchange Rates and Consumer Prices: Evidence from Brexit” at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on December 4; and “Vehicle Currency Pricing and Exchange Rate Pass-Through” at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow on December 9.

Andrew Oswald spent Monday 13th of January at the headquarters of the Office for National Statistics advising them on the analysis of their data on wellbeing and suicide. ONS now collects a range of happiness, anxiety, and other wellbeing statistics on 150,000 randomly sampled UK citizens each year.

Sascha O. Becker's paper "Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers" (with Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtlaender, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya), has been accepted at the American Economic Review.

Abstract:

We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today than other Poles. These results are driven by a shift in preferences away from material possessions toward investment in human capital.

Sascha O. Becker's paper "Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers" was covered by the Wall Street Journal in its online coverage of the ASSA meetings in San Diego (9 Jan 2020) where he presented this paper.

Peter Hammond's paper "Fundamental Utilitarianism and Intergenerational Equity with Extinction Discounting" (with Graciela Chichilnisky and Nicholas Stern), has been accepted in Social Choice and Welfare.

Abstract:

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow (1999a, b) accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ (1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitable extinction biased original position requires equal conditional probabilities, given that the individual’s generation survives the extinction process. Such a position is well-defined if and only if survival probabilities decline fast enough for the expected total number of individuals who can ever live to be finite. Then, provided that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, maximizing expected “extinction discounted” total utility — as advocated, inter alia, by the Stern Review on climate change — provides a coherent and dynamically consistent equitable objective, even when the population size of each generation can be chosen.

Media Coverage

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'The Economics of the Second World War: Eighty Years On' - Mark Harrison with Stephen Broadberry - VoxEU debate, January 2020

'The Importance of Relationship Building for Hotel Revenue and Longevity' - Andrew Oswald's research mentioned - Hospitalitynet, 9 January 2020

'Newsletter: Gold, Oil, Uncertainty and Iran' - Sascha O. Becker's insert - Wall Street Journal - 7 January 2020 [subscription needed]

Dates For Your Diary

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