Can Economists teach maths during the coronavirus lockdown?

Dr Arun Advani, Associate Professor, comments on Former Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls getting involved with BBC's on-screen lessons during the coronavirus lockdown.

"It is great to see that Ed Balls will be teaching KS3 maths. With his background in Economics, he will not be short on examples to help make it feel practical. From the relationship between money and happiness, which can illustrate quadratic functions, to the power of statistics for understanding income inequality, many of the practical questions people care about are fundamentally economic and can be understood with maths. That's also why the national Discover Economics programme, that I co-lead, will fit so well into the existing school curriculum ".

Coronavirus may cause the biggest slump since the South Sea Bubble

Dr Claudia Rei, Associate Professor, comments on reports that the conoravirus may cause a bigger fall in UK GDP than the South Sea Bubble.

"On recent comparisons between the current economic downturn and that resulting from the South Sea Bubble in the early eighteenth century, it is first important to clarify that the causes of these downturns are not the same and thus the recovery from the present crisis will likely be different".

Read her expert comment in full here.

International Survey on Coronavirus

Thiemo Fetzer, Chris Roth, and Stefano Caria are part of international team of researchers from 12 different institutions, including Harvard, Cambridge, and MIT which is collecting survey data on how citizens prepare and cope with the spreading coronavirus. The survey can be accessed at: http://covid19-survey.org/

Updates:

7th April 2020 - The first results from Global Coronavirus Survey have been published.