Department News

Professor James Fenske wins a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize

We are pleased to announce that Professor James Fenske of the Department of Economics has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize 2019.

Brexit Guidance

As the UK prepares to leave the UK, learn how the University of Warwick will continue to support staff who may be affected by Brexit.

Open Day on 19 October - Summary

On Saturday 19 October, Warwick held the second of two Open Days which gave prospective students the chance to meet staff and students, visit academic departments, tour the campus and get a real feel for life at Warwick. We welcomed over 1000 visitors to our Economics Open Day talks led by Jeremy Smith and Andrew Oswald and also provided students with an opportunity to visit us in our ‘Meet our Staff and Students’ drop-in.

A huge thank you to all staff who gave up their Saturday to support this event. The feedback received so far has been brilliant.

Warwick Question Time 2018 - Video now available

The Warwick QT 2019 full length video has been made available to view online for those who missed the event or were unable to attend. To find out more about how the event went and what was discussed as this year's topic, read our news story.

WISE Scheme

The Warwick Internship Scheme for Economists (WISE) is open for 2019/20. 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.

You will find further details of the scheme on the WISE webpage. To request project support, please submit your project proposal by 31 October 2019 via the 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).

Student Wellbeing and Support

Student Wellbeing and Support services have moved to a centralised hub in Senate House. Find out more about the variety of support services available to students.

Publications, Presentations, Workshops & Talks

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Jennifer Smith met with representations of the spectrum of UK employers, with members of the Austrialian Department of Home Affairs at the Australian High Commission, and with members of the Migration Program of the Canadian High Commission, as part of her continuing investigation with the Migration Advisory Committee of migration policy issues including Points Based Systems and salary thresholds.

Arun Advani presented "Importing Inequality: Migration, Mobility and the Top 1 percent" at the University of Glasgow on 16th October 2019.

Daniel Sgroi's paper (joint with Thomas Hills, Eugenio Proto and Chanuki Seresinhe) "Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing using Millions of Digitized Books" been published in Nature: Human Behaviour.

Abstract:In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems and higher productivity, making it a focal issue among researchers and governments. However, it is difficult to estimate how happy humans were in previous centuries. Here we show that a method based on quantitative analysis of natural language published over the past 200 years captures reliable patterns in historical subjective wellbeing. Using sentiment analysis based on psychological valence norms, we compute a national valence index for the UK, USA, Germany, and Italy, indicating relative happiness in response to national and international wars and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and GDP. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s and demonstrate robustness using words with stable historical meanings, diverse corpora (newspapers, magazines, and books), and additional word norms. Providing a window on quantitative historical psychology, this approach could inform policy and economic history.

Media Coverage

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'Economics in the UK has a diversity problem that starts in schools and colleges' - Arun Advani co-authored - Vox, 15 October 2019

'Increasing diversity in economics' - Arun Advani interviewed - Vox ,16 October 2019 - [Podcast]

'le taux d'inflation inchangé à 1,7% en septembre (ONS)' - Dennis Novy interviewed - AFP (Agence France-Presse, the French press agency), 16 October 2019

Andrew Oswald:

'Andrew appears on a news channel about his air pollution research' - Andrew Oswald interviewed -Sky News, 16 October 2019 -[Video]

• his recent research paper on air pollution was reported on the front page of The Times newspaper on Wednesday 15 October and in large numbers of other English-speaking and foreign newspapers all over the world.
• also appeared on BBC World Service, and other radio stations.

'Air pollution takes decades off memory, study suggests' - Andrew Oswald research mentioned -The Times, 16 October 2019

Daniel Sgroi:

'Scientists pinpoint the year that Britons were happiest' - Daniel Sgroi and colleagues' research mentioned -The Independent, 15 October 2019

'Britons were happier when Victoria was on the throne' - Daniel Sgroi and colleagues' research mentioned -The Times, 14 October & 15 October (front page of The Times).

• has a full list of the media citations on his research on his homepage.
• research paper was also covered on the television on the popular entertainment programme 'Have I got News For You'.
• and his co-authors were also interviewed on national radio including BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5, BBC World Service and TalkRadio (3 times) as well as regional stations.

Jonathan Cave:

• has been invited to address the German Government’s National Regulatory Control Council (Nationaler Normenkontrollrat) – their version of our Regulatory Policy Committee – on One-in/X-out rules for regulatory policy-making on 22 October.
• will be involved in a workshop at HM Treasury on “Protecting Citizens Online” on 12 November.
• will be marking the 10th Anniversary of the RPC at the House of Lords, and launching two jointly authored papers (“A decade of regulatory scrutiny” and “Fit for what purpose? New developments in the economics of impact assessment) on 20 November.

Dennis Novy:

• presented his research on "Trade and Uncertainty" (with Alan Taylor) at the Bank of England on 1 August.
• presented a new paper on "Trade, Gravity and Aggregation" (with Holger Breinlich and Joao Santos Silva) at the European Trade Study Group meeting in Bern, Switzerland, on 14 September.
• presented research on "Vehicle Currency Pricing and Exchange Rate Pass-Through" (with Natalie Chen and Wanyu Chung) at the Global Value Chain Workshop at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China on 26 July.
• spoke to Alfonso Bianchi, London correspondent of the La Stampa newspaper (Italy). He was preparing a piece on investment in the UK after Brexit, opportunities and problems. Dennis referred him to the research paper on UK FDI (Breinlich, Leromain, Novy and Sampson) and discussed the main results. The article appeared in print in La Stampa on 14 October 2019, page 19, titled “La Brexit sta spingendo gli investimenti britannici nei mercati europei".
• gave a phone interview to AFP (Agence France-Presse, the French press agency) about the depreciation of sterling in the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum and the ensuing increase in UK inflation, referring to his research on the topic. The article can be found above.

Dates for your diary

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