Department News

360 Guest Lecture with Tim Harford

The Department of Economics is pleased to announce a guest lecture by Tim Harford, as part of the 360 Guest Lecture Series 2020/21 for this academic year. Tim Harford is an economist, journalist and broadcaster. He is author of “How To Make the World Add Up” / “The Data Detective”, “Messy”, and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”. This event will take place on Monday 15 March, 3-4pm and is for open to Department staff and students only.

To learn more and register, please visit the event's webpage.

PSS Training Day

All professional services staff (PSS) in the Economics Department will be engaged in a training day on Wednesday 24 March 2021, and will be unavailable to academic staff throughout the day except for emergencies. If you have an emergency and need to contact a member of PSS on the day, please contact either Robert or Kelly in the first instance, who will be able to ensure the relevant member of staff gets in touch with you as soon as possible.

Careers in Economics Webinar Series 2021-22

As part of our Careers in Economics Webinar Series we would like you to join us for an informal discussion with a panel of Warwick Alumni discussing their career journeys since graduating from Warwick. We will be talking to four Warwick Alumni: Clara Ana Coutinho de Sousa, Nahrin Swarna, Jakob Christensen and Nikhil Sanghani.

This event is for open to Department staff and students only. Registration is required in order to attend. We look forward to seeing you there.

NSS 2021

The National Student Survey 2021 has been open since the start of February, and the Department’s response rate is currently just under 50%. Could all members of staff who teach final-year students please help to promote the NSS by encouraging students to complete the survey so that we can reach our target response rate of 65%. You can find out more about the NSS here.

Professional Support Staff

A webpage has now been created as a central depository for training and development opportunities for Professional Support Staff. Please discuss training and development with your line manager as part of the PDR process.

Untangling the Budget

CAGE will be hosting a lunchtime chat to provide an opportunity to discuss what the Chancellor’s Budget actually means.

Dr Arun Advani, CAGE Impact Director, and Dennis Novy, CAGE Associate, will be speaking.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/92586736133?pwd=UjZpL2tlSGlaaDBIOEIwdW80TVljQT09

Meeting ID: 925 8673 6133 | Passcode: 281202

Learning from Lockdown : An Interdisciplinary Network Event

The event focuses on what the Covid lockdown can teach us about interdisciplinary research - where urban environments, behaviour, work, and energy concerns intersect. It is a cross-disciplinary event focused on the connections between the pandemic, and the interdisciplinary research carried out at Warwick. This event will take place on Tuesday 30 March, 10am - 12pm, via Zoom.

Departmental HR Update

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Health and Wellbeing

Good health and wellbeing is paramount for staff at all times, but more especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The University offers a range of remote sessions dedicated to improving our wellbeing. We encourage as many of you as possible to explore any one of these opportunities. Click the link below for more information:

Online Resources

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Library Update - From Helen Riley, Economics Librarian

We hope that the main Library study space can remain open, as announced in Week 8, along with the Postgraduate Hub and various spaces in the Rootes Building. Emergency services for students and staff introduced during lockdown are to continue until early April at least - Click & Collect book borrowing, "Scan & Deliver" to request a scanned book chapter, and free postal loans in the UK. Please check the Library website for future updates.

If you would like me to have new books ordered for the Library, or if you would like to request a new journal or database, please contact me soon - Helen dot Riley at Warwick dot ac dot uk. Even if the Library cannot obtain everything you need this year, it is still good to know what you need. There is still some money for new book purchases in this financial year.

I have also been asked to remind you that we recently subscribed to Roper iPoll, which provides opinion poll data on a wide range of topics, mainly from the USA, and also Global Financial Data, which provides very long time series of aggregated stock indices, commodity prices and more. Please encourage students to use these and other resources, and I hope you will also find them useful.

IT Support - New Online Systems

A dedicated webpage on the staff intranet named ‘Working Remotely’ has been created, where it documents the various tools we are using to collaborate with one another, i.e. Microsoft Teams and how to access your email and the H and M drives.

NOTE – this webpage is constantly being updated with new information so please revisit it if you have any questions.

Publications, Presentations & Workshops

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Marcus Miller's paper on "Choosing the narrative : the shadow banking crisis in light of Covid” has been accepted in the Journal of Open Economies Review (In Press).

Abstract

Could experiencing a health pandemic aid in understanding the nature of financial crisis? It might, for example, help to discriminate between different narratives that claim to do so. In this spirit, two influential accounts of the near-collapse of shadow banking in the US financial crisis of 2008 are analysed: one developed by Mark Gertler and Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and the other presented by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US Congress. Using a common two-sector framework, key features of these contrasting accounts of the market for banking services are presented, along with their corresponding diagnoses of what precipitated financial crisis. To see what the experience of Covid might imply about their relative credibility, four aspects of the current pandemic are considered: how it began from a small biological shock; how it gets spread by contagion; the significance of externalities; and how it may end with a vaccine. But the reader is left to form his or her own judgement.

Dan Bernhardt's paper (joint with Constantinou, Evangelos and Shadmehr, Mehdi) on "When do co-located firms selling identical products thrive?” has been accepted in the Journal of Industrial Economics (In Press).

Abstract

When consumers only see prices once they visit stores, and some consumers have time to comparison shop, co-location commits stores to compete and lower prices, which draws consumers away from isolated stores. Profits of co-located firms are a single-peaked function of the number of shoppers—co-located firms thrive when there are some shoppers, but not too many. When consumers know in advance whether they have time to shop, effects are enhanced: co-located stores may draw enough shoppers to drive the expected price paid by a non-shopper below that paid when consumers do not know if they will have time to shop

Dan Bernhardt's paper (joint with Ordonez-Calafi, Guillem) on "Blockholder disclosure thresholds and hedge fund activism.” has been accepted in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (In Press).

Abstract

Blockholder disclosure thresholds shape incentives for hedge fund activism, which are jointly determined with real investment and managerial behavior. Uninformed investors value lower thresholds (greater transparency) when the cost of trading against an informed activist outweighs the benefits of the activist’s disciplining of management. Conversely, activists may desire disclosure thresholds if their threat of participation discourages managerial malfeasance, which is their source of profits. Hedge fund activism can be excessive: if market opacity sufficiently harms uninformed investors, the costs of reduced real investment outweigh the social benefits from managerial disciplining, and society benefits from lower thresholds.

Andrew Oswald gave an invited public lecture at Swansea University School of Management. Topic is "Herd Behaviour" on 10 March.

Arun Advani has the following updates:

• Wealth tax work was mentioned in "tax after covid" report from Treasury Select Committee on 01/3/21
• Presented work on Ethnic Diversity in Economics Research and Economics Researchers at Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on 04/03/21

Working Papers

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Subhasish Dey's working paper ( with Tanisha Ghosal) ' Can Conditional Cash Transfer Defer Child Marriage? Impact of Kanyashree Prakalpa in West Bengal, India' has been released as part of the Warwick Economics Research working paper series.

Arun Advani's working paper ( with Andy Summers & Hannah Tarrant) 'Measuring UK top incomes' has been released as part of the Warwick Economics Research working paper series.

Media Coverage

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'Should the state tax the rich for the common good?' - Arun Advani's research mentioned - Anadolu Agency - 6 March 2021.

'LexisPSL 2021 Budget Coverage' - Arun Advani research - Lexis Nexis - March 2021.

'BBC 5 Live Breakfast' - Arun Advani interviewed - BBC Radio 5, Sounds - 4 March 2021.

Dates For Your Diary

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