Undergraduate as Researcher

How do you bring research into your teaching?

[00:12] Professor Daniel Sgroi: Warwick Economics is a research-led teaching environment. That means many of the people who teach economics here, are also at the forefront of academic research. That means we have the potential to offer a wide variety of different options in many different areas. I, for example, teach an experimental economics option which is a very rare option to have at the undergraduate level, because this is something that I do as a researcher, and we offer many different options that pull in individuals who do cutting-edge research, into their teaching.

What is your dissertation about?

[00:45] Adam Nowakowski (BSc Economics): So my Research in Applied Economics is on populism. The question I ask is 'Why do the unhappy vote for change?', and I aim to evaluate the role of subjective wellbeing measures like happiness and life satisfaction, or feelings about your income in causing voting for populist parties.

[01:02] Hazel Gould-Fleming (BSc Economics): So my dissertation title is 'Terror in Turkey: Can terrorism explain Turkey's Feldstein-Horioka paradox' I'm trying to see whether the high levels of terrorism that Turkey experiences has an influence on their consumer behaviours. So their saver behaviour and their investor behaviour.

[01:19] Nadia Bancha (BSc Economics): So the topic of my RAE project was 'How pay transparency policies affect the gender wage gap'. I did a lot of research into what kind of things might make the gender wage gap worse. One of the things that really stood out to me was pay secrecy or pay transparency.

How have you found the teaching at Warwick Economics?

[01:38] Shreya Thummar (BSc/BA Economics, Politics and International Studies): Most of my lectures are just people who are experts in their field, they have written books and they are also approachable at the same time, so I can go to them at any time and ask questions.

What impact has your research had?

[01:52] Professor Daniel Sgroi: A lot of my research, particularly the research on measuring happiness, and trying to understand how happiness affects behaviour, has been covered by hundreds of different media outlets, I've done many different radio reports, I've talked to government, I've talked to international bodies, and many of my ideas have been taken on board, and happiness if now being taken very much more seriously as an economics concept and as an important policy objective, than it ever was before, and the work of me and many of my colleagues in Warwick has been important in pushing that message.