Departmental news
WLS Staff Spotlight: Dr Jeremmy Okonjo
Our next Warwick Law School Staff Spotlight interview features Dr Jeremmy Okonjo, Assistant Professor and Academic Careers Officer.
International Day of Women and Girls in Science: shining a spotlight on Professor Emma MacPherson and her work.
As part of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Professor Emma MacPherson details her work on advancing skin cancer screening and diagnosis using terahertz wavesLink opens in a new window.
WLS academics present reforms to UK Parliament to deal with sovereign debt crisis
Dr Stephen Connelly and Professor Celine Tan from Warwick Law School have published proposals for UK legislative reform to support global efforts to resolve sovereign debt crises in developing countries.
Sixth suite of top Economics student research papers showcased on Warwick Monash portal
We are proud to report that four of the best Warwick Economics student dissertations have been published in the sixth round of the Warwick Monash Economics Student Papers (WM-ESP) series.
The WM-ESP portal showcases the top innovative and original research papers written by Warwick and Monash undergraduate and postgraduate students. Over 74 papers have been published since its launch in 2021, covering the most significant topics for young economists in todays climate, including the housing market, climate change, gender inequality and healthcare.
We congratulate our four students for this fantastic achievement and for the fascinating research that they have conducted; we wish them all the best for their future endeavours.
You can find out more about their research papers below:
Sai Shreyas Krishna KumarLink opens in a new window's paper explores what the potential policy of allowing women to work night-shifts would have on the Indian female labour market. He commented:
“I am delighted and honoured to have my MSc thesis featured in the WM-ESP series. In this paper, I address an important question on how removing restrictions on night shifts for women workers affect their labour market outcomes. This was an exciting yet challenging piece of research to work on. I particularly enjoyed learning about developing context-specific identification strategies that has held me in good stead even after my Master’s degree. Having my paper published on WM-ESP is a crucial stepping stone in building my career as a researcher and I will always be thankful to the WM-ESP editors, my supervisor and professors for their role in my academic journey.”
In her paper, Heng Ying LiLink opens in a new window evaluates the impact of a residential landlord tax reform (Section 24 of the Finance (No. 2) Act 2015) on property prices, using Difference-in-differences and Logit to examine property transaction data and determine whether buy-to-let is still worthwhile after the reform. She commented:
"I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have my paper selected for the Warwick Monash Economics Student Paper Series, which will be available to both aspiring students and economists. In this work, I looked at the impact of a tax policy reform and used specialised approaches to process large amounts of data. I hope these techniques inspire and encourage other policy researchers to focus more on individual-level data because they enable custom aggregation and greater modelling precision."
Esa Azali Asyahid's paper analyses local government splits in Indonesia over the past 20 years and analyses its impact on business revenue growth, particularly at the household-level. He comments:
"I am thrilled and honoured to be recognized for my hard work! I hope that the publication of my dissertation in this series will make it reach a broader audience as the topic is important yet still under-researched. I am really grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Andreas Stegmann, for his unwavering support and invaluable guidance throughout this project."
In his paper, Venkata Tanay Kasyap KondiparthyLink opens in a new window explores the concept of Type spaces in finite player games as constructed by Brandenburger and Dekel, and extends it to infinitely many player games, analysing the inductions that can be drawn. He commented:
"I am very pleased to have been included in this year’s Warwick-Monash Economics student paper series. I completed my undergraduate studies at Warwick Economics as well and have always had an ambition to complete a theory research work in mathematical economics and economic theory. This ambition was sparked due to the incredible mathematical economics courses provided by the Warwick Economics department. However, pure theory research works are often a risky proposition, given the intensive time commitment to complete both the MSc Dissertation and the undergraduate RAE.
With the help of my wonderful supervisors Prof Polemarchakis and Prof Hammond, I have been able to achieve this aspiration. I am very happy to have been able to complete my thesis in one of the most technical sub-fields of game theory and provide a novel contribution to the literature. It has been an incredible learning experience, combining topics from mathematics in measure theory, functional analysis, stochastic processes, and economic theory topics generally available during advanced years of PhD training. I am very happy to have been able to understand and extend this literature, which I hope can one day become the foundation of my PhD thesis.
I can gladly say this paper has been the most fruitful academic experience of my complete tenure at Warwick Economics and hope it encourages future MSc and BSc students to undertake their dissertations in economic theory."
Relevant Links
Top Economics student research showcased on Warwick Monash portal in it's fifth release 9 October 2023
Fourth Suite of student research papers showcased on Warwick Monash portal 9 March 2023
WMG staff praised for international manufacturing project
Three members of staff from WMG, at the University of Warwick, have been praised for their ‘excellent’ work to support the Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda (CCA) in implementing Manufacturing 4.0 in Mauritius.
The CCA is a major member-state led initiative to grow intra-commonwealth trade and investment and promote expanded investment to support global growth, create employment, and promote knowledge exchange among Commonwealth members.
The WMG team led by Dr Hamid Moradlou together with colleagues Tarek El-Said from the Supply Chain Group, and Onur Eren from the SME Group, responded to a funding call from the Commonwealth Secretariat to support Commonwealth countries with their connectivity agenda.
The trio were praised for delivering a well-received capacity building programme for local policymakers and manufacturing businesses including comprehensive understanding of Manufacturing 4.0; strategic vision and roadmap development; effective technology integration; change management and innovation; policy navigation; and performance measurement and sustainability.
Dr Hamid Moradlou explained: “This project was a great example of collaboration between industry, academia, and policymakers. The initiative was equally
supported by both the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Ministry of Industrial Development, SMEs and Cooperatives in Mauritius, facilitating the work done by WMG in eight manufacturing companies from various sectors. The success of this project has led to further discussions around scaling this project in other Commonwealth countries.”
WMG supports SME manufacturers with digital technologies across the UK. Find out more here: https://warwick.ac.uk/wmg/for-industry/sme-support/
New national initiative to educate the public on automated vehicles (AVs)
Today (Wednesday 21st February 2024), WMG at The University of Warwick, has launched the Partners for Automated Vehicle Education United Kingdom
(PAVE UK) with the Department for Business and Trade, the Department for Transport, the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), and Transport for West Midlands, as its founding partners.
The PAVE UK initiative aims to build public confidence in self-driving technology through a programme of education and engagement, supporting the UK Government’s ambition to safely deploy self-driving vehicles on the road and its aim to make the UK the leader in artificial intelligence (AI).
PAVE UK is the country’s first non-governmental organisation that advocates for and delivers public education and engagement programmes on automated vehicles. It launched today at the Royal Automobile Club in London, with Anthony Browne MP (Technology and Decarbonisation Minister), and Professor Sarah Sharples (Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Transport), as the keynote speakers. Over 100 technology developers, safety campaign groups, regulators, innovators, and industry leaders discussed how to ensure the public is engaged in the self-driving technology journey and how to accurately communicate AV safety messages with different stakeholders in society.
Professor Siddartha Khastgir, Head of Verification & Validation at WMG, University of Warwick said: "At WMG, we strive to enhance the safety of self-driving technology and ensure it is safe to operate on the roads. In taking a people first approach, the public should be paramount in the safety conversation and part of the journey during the development and deployment of self-driving vehicles on UK roads.
“PAVE UK will translate technical information into clear, comprehensive and accurate messaging to help communicate safety to the public in an inclusive and accessible manner. Future technology users and other road users will be equipped with the knowledge of benefits and limits of this new transport technology. PAVE UK will also bring together the self-driving ecosystem to tackle the technological challenges, speak honestly and accurately about system capabilities and limitations, and encourage innovators to put the public at the heart of this.”
PAVE UK will work closely with the entire UK Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM) ecosystem, to carry out education and engagement programmes, such as research-based educational materials packs, school outreach activities, community outreach, an online video library, webinars, and an online educational app. The programme will be delivered by WMG at the University of Warwick.
Nusrat Ghani MP, Minister for Industry and Economic Security, said: “The UK automotive sector is at the cutting edge of exploiting new innovative technologies. These have the potential to create jobs, grow the economy and accelerate how we reach net-zero.
“This government has shown time and time again that we're committed to creating the right conditions to boost UK advanced manufacturing, and the PAVE UK initiative will help cement the UK as a world leader in self-driving technology."
Technology and Decarbonisation Minister Anthony Browne said: “Self-driving vehicles have the potential to transform our transport sector, and PAVE UK will be a big part of this by raising awareness and embedding confidence in people throughout the country. In the meantime, we’re making sure that these vehicles are safe to use on our roads. Our Automated Vehicles Bill sets a rigorous standard for safety, whilst making sure that this country is where businesses can develop and deploy their cutting-edge technology.”
Organisations and schools wishing to participate in the programmes can contact PAVEUK@warwick.ac.uk
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Note to editors
Additional quotes
Tara Andringa, Executive Director, PAVE said: "When PAVE was founded in 2019, it was a bet on the power of knowledge: we believed that if the public understands the facts of autonomous vehicles, we will see greater public trust in this incredibly promising technology. Our campaign both seeks to demystify automated vehicles– to explain how the technology works – and to help the public understand how these technologies could help to improve the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of our transportation system.
“While countries and regions have adopted different regulatory approaches to automated vehicles, the challenge of AV education is global in nature. Given the tremendous leadership from the UK both in its approach to AV policy and to civic engagement on the technology, we are incredibly excited for the influential role PAVE UK will play in leading public education. The PAVE ecosystem is thrilled for the launch of PAVE UK, and we will work together to build an engagement campaign that will create a template for AV education worldwide."
Automated Vehicles Bill: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3506
About WMG, University of Warwick
WMG is a world leading research and education group, transforming organisations and driving innovation through a unique combination of collaborative research and development, and pioneering education programmes.
As an international role model for successful partnerships between academia and the private and public sectors, WMG develops advancements nationally and globally, in applied science, technology and engineering, to deliver real impact to economic growth, society and the environment.
WMG’s education programmes focus on lifelong learning of the brightest talent, from the WMG Academies for Young Engineers, degree apprenticeships, undergraduate and postgraduate, through to professional programmes.
An academic department of the University of Warwick, and a centre for the HVM Catapult, WMG was founded by the late Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya in 1980 to help reinvigorate UK manufacturing and improve competitiveness through innovation and skills development.
About PAVE UK
PAVE UK aims to bring the conversation about automated vehicles (AVs) to the public so that future users and technology developers can play a role in shaping our future.
By arranging education and engagement programmes around AVs, our goal is to increase the public’s awareness of the capabilities and limitations of the technology and build up societal acceptance and trust in this new transport innovation. We also aim to develop a correct user attitude to foster the safe deployment of AVs.
We strongly believe that by fully and transparently equipping the public with CAM technology knowledge, we could then achieve the potential benefits of the technology.
Media contact:
Annie Slinn
Communications Officer (Sciences)
Gabbie Lau
WMG Marketing and Communications Officer (Verification and Validation Research Group)
More capital gains are received in one neighbourhood in Kensington than in Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle combined, finds new report.
Total capital gains have almost tripled over the last decade, to £65bn by 2019/20. Despite this, most people never receive any capital gains, with less than 3% of adults paying capital gains tax over a ten-year period. In any given year just 0.5% of adults receive any gains, less than the number of additional rate (“45p”) income tax payers.
Instead, capital gains are incredibly concentrated:
· Three in every seven pounds of gains in the UK go to people earning more than £150k. By contrast the same group receives one in every seven pounds in income.
· More than half (52.2%) of all taxable gains in 2020 went to just 5,000 people, who received an average of over £6.8m per person in gains.
· Gains are strongly concentrated in southern England, with more gains in the parliamentary constituency of Kensington than in all of Wales. One neighbourhood of Kensington, comprising just 6400 people, had more gains than three major cities combined: Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.
· Even within London there are large disparities: someone living in Kensington is more than 50 times as likely to receive gains as someone in Barking.
These findings come from new research which gained unprecedented access to the anonymised tax records of capital gains tax payers. The study, by researchers from the University of Warwick and The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), analysed the anonymised personal tax returns of everyone who received taxable capital gains between 1997 and 2020.
A capital gain is the money received from selling an investment for more than the purchase price. Capital gains face a separate tax regime to income, with rates varying between 10 and 28% depending on the taxpayer’s income level and the type of asset sold. Capital gains tax rates are always lower than income tax rates for the same person, with reliefs in place that allow up to £10million to be received at a 10% tax rate even for the highest rate taxpayers.
These preferential rates benefit few people, who are largely well-off. Just 0.3% of people with income under £50,000 had taxable gains in an average year, but this rises to almost 40% of taxpayers with incomes over £5m receiving some gains. The median gainer in the latter group received £372,000 in gains in an average year, benefiting substantially from the gap between capital gains tax and income tax rates.
Ranking people by gains received, the top 50,000 gainers – who make up about 0.1% of UK adults – received 86.4% of gains, worth £56 billion in total, with each person receiving at least £143,000.
Before reforms in 1998, capital gains tax was progressive: those with the highest gains paid a higher share in capital gains tax. Since the early 2000s, by when the 1998 reforms had fully taken effect, capital gains tax has largely been neutral among top gainers. Under the ‘taper relief’ regime in the 2000s it was in some years regressive.
Arun Advani, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick’s Economics Department and CAGE Research Centre, said: “Capital gains are absurdly concentrated, with half the gains in the entire country going to as many people as could fit in the Albert Hall. Less than one in thirty people have any gains at all over the course of a decade.”
Andrew Lonsdale, Research Officer at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute (III), said: “There are more capital gains in Kensington than the whole of Wales, and more in Hampstead and Kilburn than the North East of England. Continuing to tax these gains at a lower rate than earnings from work is the complete opposite of ‘levelling up’.”
Andy Summers, Associate Professor at LSE Law School and III, said: “Although not common in the wider population, capital gains are a standard way to receive remuneration for the super-rich. This makes the tax break for capital gains particularly regressive.”
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Notes to editors
- CAGE Policy Brief Who would be affected by Capital Gains Tax reform by Arun Advani, Andrew Lonsdale, and Andy Summers is available here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/bn40.2024.pdf
- A taxpayer realises a capital gain when they sell (or otherwise dispose of) an asset that has increased in value from the price at which they acquired it. Capital Gains Tax typically applies if the assets sold were held for investment.
- The report used access to anonymised confidential data from the tax records of everyone who received taxable capital gains at any point over the period 1997–2020, accessed via the HMRC Datalab.
- Mandatory disclaimer: This work contains statistical data from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) which are Crown Copyright. The research data sets used may not exactly reproduce HMRC aggregates. The use of HMRC statistical data in this work does not imply the endorsement of HMRC in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the information.
- This research was funded by the Nuffield Foundation 'Reforming Capital Gains Tax' grant (GE/FR-000024377) grant, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through the ‘Taxing the Super Rich’ grant (ES/W001683/1) and CAGE Research Centre at Warwick (ES/L011719/1), and by LSE International Inequalities Institute, LSE Law, and Warwick Economics.
Recommend a female scientist who inspires you
To mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science and International Women's Day, we are creating a set of resources celebrating female scientists.
Onion Crisis: Researchers Combatting Destructive Crop Disease Costing Farmers £10m Annually
The British Onions Producers’ Association (BOPA) leads a £1 million project, with researchers from Warwick, industry leaders, and innovators to combat Fusarium Basal Rot (FBR), a menace to the UK onion industry.
Professor John Clarkson, Plant Pathologist, said: “This project is an exciting opportunity for the School of Life Sciences and School of Engineering to provide new approaches to tackling Fusarium basal rot of onion, which is increasingly devastating for UK onion growers. As well as supporting Engineering and the wider consortium with expertise on the disease, my team at the Warwick Crop Centre will develop new DNA-based molecular diagnostic approaches to detect the pathogen in soil so that growers can use this test to avoid planting onions in highly infested fields. The test may also help to assess the risk of onions developing basal rot in storage”.
Press Release (19 February 2024)
Funding for joint Warwick-Aston Engineering Biology research paves the way for enhanced sustainable manufacturing and drug discovery
A team of academics from The University of Warwick and Aston University has secured a £1.8m grant to engineer microbial cell factories to produce membrane proteins which will support future drug screening and sustainable chemical production.
Press Release (19 February 2024).