Departmental news

Digital platforms are increasingly taking engagement metrics into account when compensating journalists and other content creators – but does this have a negative effect on pay, quality, tone or coverage?

A new studyLink opens in a new window by Dr Mateusz Stalinski (University of Warwick) and co-authors is among the first to provide answers, based on a field study with a Kenyan digital news platform.

The writers were split into three groups – one-third continued on the existing per-article contract; one-third moved to a pay-per-click (PPC) model; and one-third chose between the two options.

PAY

• Although their articles received double the views of the control group – good news for advertisers! - the journalists who moved to pay-per-click saw their overall earnings fall by 49 per cent

CONTENT

• The pay-per-click journalists focused more on national stories, and on political topics. These shifts are consistent with writers maximizing reach by selecting topics with broad appeal. However, the resulting decline in comprehensive and locally-relevant coverage may carry important civic costs.

TONE

• The pay-per-click writers used fewer positive words in their headlines and produced articles with higher toxicity scores and more negative tone.

Dr Stalinski said “While PPC writers earned more per article, their overall earnings fell, lowering the firm’s wage bill and increasing platform profits. However, these profits come at a cost: PPC writers shifted content production away from local news and towards attention-grabbing political stories.

“PPC writers also used less positive language in both headlines and article bodies. Our results show that engagement-based pay boosts reader traffic, but we also caution that this may come at the cost of compromised coverage diversity, local news provision, and journalist well-being.”

• Incentivizing Engagement: Experimental Evidence on Journalist Performance PayLink opens in a new window Ivan Balbuzanov, Jared Gars, Mateusz Stalinski & Emilia Tjernström Warwick Economics Research Papers No: 1570 July 2025

The Department of Economics is proud to celebrate the achievements of our graduates - Class of 2025. The awards and prizes recognise not only academic excellence but also outstanding contributions to the wider student experience and community.

Outstanding Student Contribution Awards (OSCA) 2025

Three students were honoured with the OSCA for their leadership, service, and innovation:

• Gunisha Aggarwal (BSc Economics) – For her transformative work in student inclusion, international outreach, and global education initiatives, including her leadership in Enactus Warwick and the HELP Chennai project.
• Libby Bach (BSc Economics) – For her dedication to global education through Warwick in Africa, community volunteering, and her selection for the FCDO Fast Stream.
• Aimee Cornish (BSc PPE) – For championing gender equality and community through her leadership of the Warwick Women in Economics Society and impactful events like the Elevate Conference.

Professor Jeremy Smith, Head of the Department of Economics, commented:

“Gunisha, Libby, and Aimee exemplify the values we hold dear at Warwick - leadership, service, and a commitment to making a difference. Their contributions have enriched our community and will continue to inspire future generations.”

Academic Prize Winners 2024–25

• Best MSc Project (Behavioural and Economic Science – Economics Track) - Anoushka Kumar
• Examiners’ Prize for Outstanding Performance in Economics - Jacob McLoughlin, Ren Jie Lim, Maddy Pedder, Oli Greenfield
• Examiners’ Prize for Best Research in Applied Economics (RAE) - Fasai Charoensudjai, Martin Huo, Jacob McLoughlin
• Rohin Modasia Prize - Aigli Danopoulou, Cian Lester, Matthew Stubbs, William Tang
• Shiv Nath Prize (Economics, Politics, and International Studies) - Finlay Davis, Yiran Huang
• Outstanding Student Contribution Prize (Department of Economics) - Matthew Murray – For his leadership as President of Warwick Economics Society and his role in launching the Policy Talks event.

King’s Award for Voluntary Service 2024

We also congratulate Modhurima Islam, Student President of Warwick Volunteers 2024-25, for her contribution to the work of Warwick Volunteers who were awarded the King’s Award for Voluntary Service for 2024.

Professor Jeremy Smith added:

“We extend our warmest congratulations to all the winners. Your achievements reflect the dedication, creativity, and excellence that define our department. We look forward to seeing the impact you will continue to make in your future endeavours."

Photo from left to right: Professor Stuart Croft, Gunisha Aggarwal, Libby Bach and Aimee Cornish

Autonomy – the feeling of control over how, when and where work gets done - has become recognised as a key driver of employee satisfaction and productivity, especially in the post-COVID hybrid workplace.

But, far from rising throughout a person’s career, new evidence looking at nearly half a million workers in Australia, Germany, the UK and England shows that autonomy peaks in mid-career then steadily declines towards retirement.

In their new paper, “The growth and collapse of autonomy at workLink opens in a new window,” published this month in PNAS, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick Economics and Associate Professor Redzo Mujcic of Warwick Business School analyse longitudinal data from more than 400,000 workers in three rich countries to trace in detail their own feelings about their job autonomy, and cross reference this with objective measures such as job titles.

They find that from the age of around 40, in all of the countries studied, job autonomy collapses as people move from middle age towards retirement – which may represent 20 to 30 years of working life.

It is the first study to identify this “hump-shaped” pattern, which remains true for both subjective data – the worker’s own feelings – and more objective measures such as whether a person holds a formal managerial or supervisory position, according to their job title.

The researchers suggest that formal and informal demotions and “sidelining” must play a greater part in the modern labour market than is usually believed.

They also highlight that the curve is not explained by people moving to a new employer in a lower-autonomy role – the data shows that the phenomenon mostly occurs within the same employer.

Professor Oswald said: “We assumed that older workers would today be the ones who ruled the roost and had high autonomy. That is not remotely what we found.”

Dr Mujcic added: “We hope that economists, psychologists, HR specialists and other social and behavioural scientists will pick up this baton and seek to uncover what is driving this international phenomenon; and to reconcile this “hump” with the “bath-tub” wellbeing evidence seen in many other studies.”

• R. Mujcic, & A.J. Oswald, The growth and collapse of autonomy at work, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (27) e2504419122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2504419122 (2025).

The UK and India signed the landmark Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) on Thursday 24 July, to foster greater research and scientific collaboration between the two nations. Professor Robin Clark, Dean of WMG, and Professor Siddartha Khastgir, Head of Safe Autonomy at WMG, share their thoughts on the deal.

 A collaboration of physicists (led by Dr Marina Lafarga Magro and Yoshi Eschen) marked a milestone by holding the first ever Orbyts conferenceLink opens in a new window at the University of Warwick on 20^th of June this year.

Trials of Solihull's self-driving shuttle service are set to be extended after launching in March 2025 as part of the SCALE project. The SCALE project is a pioneering partnership led by Solihull Council and supported by WMG, and is one of nine projects to have received funding from the UK Government-funded Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM) Pathfinder – Enhancements programme.

We really enjoyed celebrating with our fantastic graduating students on Friday. If you have Instagram you can watch our reelLink opens in a new window to see the highlights!

We would like to wish all our graduates all the best in their future work or study.

Click the link to view our 2024/25 prize winners.

New analysis by an international team including Professor Sonia Bhalotra of Warwick Economics and CAGE finds a strong link between job loss and domestic violence. According to the research, published this month in The Review of Economic Studies, men who lose their jobs are more likely to inflict domestic violence, while women who lose their jobs are more likely to become victims. The increases are upwards of 30%.

• Unemployment - whether of men or women- increases domestic violence
• Men who lose their jobs are more likely to inflict domestic violence
• Women who lose their jobs are more likely to become victims of domestic violence
• Unemployment benefits have potential to mitigate this if designed correctly
• These results are relevant globally given that unemployment occurs not just cyclically but also on account of structural changes and automation.

The study discusses carefully designed unemployment benefits as a new approach to policy measures intended to protect women and girls.

Professor Bhalotra said:

“Our study uses administrative data from Brazil to understand the effects of job loss and unemployment benefit payments on domestic violence. Our evidence suggests that job loss triggers two mechanisms – income loss, and an increase in potential time at home. The loss of income creates stress within the household, while more time at home increases exposure to the risk of domestic violence.”

The study is based on large scale data from Brazil, analysed by Sonia Bhalotra with Diogo Britto and Paolo Pinotti of Bocconi University in Italy and Breno Sampaio of Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil.

The researchers analysed court registers for Brazil that contain every domestic violence case during 2009–2018. In this period there were 2 million domestic violence cases, representing 11% of all criminal justice cases, which were then linked to employment registers, with details of around 100 million workers, 60 million employment spells and 10 million layoffs per year.

The study also included measures of domestic violence that do not rely on victims reporting the event to the police. These are indicators for women using domestic violence public shelters, and notifications of domestic violence by health providers that are mandated by the federal government.

They find that job loss has a significant effect on domestic violence, and that unemployment benefits may not mitigate this effect if they lead to men being unemployed for longer. Benefits do, however, have the potential to mitigate the effect if accompanied by policies that encourage men back into work.

Professor Bhalotra added:

“Our main findings are that job loss influences domestic violence first by generating an income shortfall, and second by increasing exposure to violence. So, the ideal policy intervention would compensate the income shortfall and get people out of the home and back to work.

“Unemployment benefits can help but need to be combined with active policies aimed at getting the unemployed back to work. Traditionally, these policies are training and support with job search, but they could include community service.”

“The policy infrastructure has been primarily concerned with providing support to victims in the shape of shelters, counselling and protection orders. Interventions designed to prevent domestic violence have focused on the economic empowerment of women, though the evidence shows that they misfire in settings where men want to maintain economic control. Our research suggests that it is equally important to consider the economic status of men and the potential for policies that compensate both men and women for income losses.”

• Sonia Bhalotra, Diogo G C Britto, Paolo Pinotti, Breno Sampaio: Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence, The Review of Economic Studies, 2025; rdaf004, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaf004
  
  
• The authors acknowledge financial support from The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Professor Bhalotra acknowledges support from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 885698 and from ESRC grant ESM010236-1 awarded to the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology project at the Human Rights Centre in Essex.

A new paper from the Royle lab describes a method to label membrane contact sites in living cells on-demand. Laura Downie found that the Lamin B Receptor (LBR), which is usually on the nuclear envelope, can be used as a multi-purpose contact site highlighter. With a bit of engineering, LBR can label ER contacts with the plasma membrane, mitochondria, lysosomes, endosomes, lipid droplets and the Golgi! We found Golgi-ER contact sites persist in mitosis, a time when the Golgi is broken down but the contact sites remain intact! As a bonus track, the paper contains a method to segment mitochondria and ER from volume-EM data using machine learning, and find their contacts in 3D.

Read the paper here.

We are excited to share that Dr Rachael Blakey has been shortlisted for the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) Peter Birks Prize for her monograph, Rethinking Family Mediation: The Role of the Family Mediator in Contemporary Times. The prize recognises outstanding legal scholarship published by Early Career Academics.