University of Warwick researcher Dr Lory Barile is passionate about reaching new audiences with her work on understanding the barriers to improving the energy efficiency of our homes, so when the chance came up to promote her Retrofit Rocks project at Coventry’s Godiva Festival she didn’t hesitate.

Dr Barile and her team took a stall in the Your Coventry tent alongside community groups from across Coventry to meet festivalgoers and speak with them about her work.

She explains: “We decided to attend Godiva as we wanted to promote the Retrofit Rocks project to the public, particularly to schools in Coventry.

“The Godiva festival attracts enormous audiences – typically around 70,000 people – so we thought it was a great opportunity both to promote the project, which is ongoing, and to raise awareness of housing retrofitting schemes.

“Some Coventry residents may be eligible for financial support to improve the energy efficiency of their homes so also we wanted to let people know about this and help the Council to increase uptake of the schemes.”

As part of the Retrofit Rocks project Dr Barile and her team have worked with pupils, parents and staff at St Augustine’s Catholic Primary School in Radford, Coventry. The pupils carried out scientific experiments measuring the insulation properties of various materials and worked with local artists to design their own 3D models of well-insulated homes.

The project team will draw up a toolkit and a policy briefing to share the lessons which emerged during the workshops about why people don’t take advantage of retrofitting and other insulation schemes.

Despite competing for attention with headline acts including Eurovision star Sam Ryder, Richard Ashcroft and Beverly Knight, Dr Barile found that festival-goers were interested in the project and happy to hear more.

She said: “It was a great experience We spoke with at least 600 people, handed out our flyers with information on how to get in touch with us, and promoted our survey.

“People living in our communities are the recipients of policies made by policymakers, so it is crucial to understand the problems they face if we are to design policies that can truly be effective.

“It was really rewarding to see people engaging with the project and sharing their experiences with housing retrofitting. It was especially inspiring to see the children at St Augustine’s school asking for more workshops and activities to help save the planet. I loved every second of this project and I am sure my team did as well.”

• The survey is still open and Dr Barile is keen to hear from Coventry residents – access it at this link.

Dr Nathan Canen joined the Department of Economics in April 2023. Here he discusses his work in the areas of political economy and econometrics, and what attracted him to join the Department.

What research projects are you currently involved with?

My research can be broadly categorised into two fields. The first one is political economy, which studies the role of politics in shaping economic policies and outcomes. The second one is econometrics, which studies statistical methods for economics problems.

Within political economy, my main research projects focus on the organisation of political parties and the use of information by citizens, voters and politicians. For example, I have been studying sources of political polarisation – which is the divergence in political behaviour across party lines. This is a fascinating question given its relevance and implications for policymaking. But it is also deceptively hard to answer: politicians may diverge in their behaviour because of their ideologies, or because opposing parties are effective at convincing them to behave in a certain way. Disentangling these explanations requires careful use of economic theory and data. With new methods, we find that a party’s effectiveness at corralling its members has been an important driver of polarisation in politicians’ behaviour in the U.S. over the last few decades.

As researchers, we typically do not observe what drives legislative or citizens’ behaviour. Instead, we must infer those explanations from outcomes (e.g. how politicians vote on bills, what committees decide to approve, what news citizens view on TV). Quantitative answers to these questions often involve nonstandard datasets (e.g. network relationships among politicians), computationally intensive methods or theoretical properties making them hard to quantify (e.g., our theoretical models may have multiple solutions). Most importantly, we cannot easily ’randomise’ treatment to evaluate alternative political systems and institutions. My research in econometrics addresses these challenges by providing new statistical tools designed for the political economy problems I work on. By carefully thinking through the type of assumptions in such contexts, we can develop better suited estimators and statistical tests.

Why did you choose this research field?

I have always been fascinated by the interaction between politics and economics: it was my main interest during my undergraduate degree! As I continued within the field of economics, I learned more about political economy and became even more passionate about it. I particularly liked its emphasis on thinking through the feasibility of desirable policies. This led me to my PhD at the University of British Columbia, where I worked with my amazing supervisor and co-authors. My first paper studied networks in Congress: how politicians choose who to work with to craft and pass bills.

While I was working on those topics, I found myself facing methodological challenges that required new tools. For example, data about politicians’ networks cannot rely on commonly used statistics, which are built on assumptions of independence across observations. So, I continued to take econometrics classes and think about how I could improve the statistical approaches in my political economy papers. I was then very happy to be able to co-author with econometricians interested in the same types of statistical problems. The rest is history!

What are you planning to work on next?

On the political economy side, I am starting a research agenda on the role of deliberation in decision-making in committees. Many important regulatory bodies use advisory committees when making decisions. For instance, regulatory agencies in healthcare (e.g., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US or the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK) use such committees when deciding whether to approve a new product. Congressional and parliamentary committees also perform similar information gathering.

These committees deliberate before making a final recommendation. Their deliberations can be based on existing information, but committee members can also request additional information. Hence, they may act strategically to learn more information, with a goal of influencing (e.g., persuading or convincing their peers), thereby influencing the committee’s decision. In these projects, we use transcript data from FDA Advisory Committees. We transform this data in a way that can be quantified within a theoretical model of learning in committees. Then, we evaluate the role of individual preferences, information and strategic incentives in driving committee-level outcomes and compare their performance to alternative institutional designs. We are hopeful this will lend insights into evaluating the performance of these institutions.

On the econometrics front, I have become interested in the assumptions needed for counterfactual analysis (i.e. the evaluation of policies that have yet to be implemented). For example, how do we evaluate the effects of a future minimum wage, when that minimum wage has yet to be observed? Making these predictions is a hard statistical problem. Typically, researchers may use a theoretical model and assumptions to provide reasonable estimates. However, some of my recent results suggest that researchers may not need all of those assumptions, making their results more ’robust’.

What impact do you hope your work will have on society?

Broadly speaking, I hope my work shows the need for nuance in policymaking, and how theory and data are helpful. It is often tempting to make a conclusion based on a striking figure or descriptive evidence. However, when analysing individual actions – such as in politics – those answers may not faithfully represent actual behaviour or mechanisms. Hence, even well-intentioned policies may have different effects depending on what type of incentives are given.

For example, whether political polarisation is being driven by party organisation, rather than politician ideologies, matters for which policies get approved. Whether voters are demanding too little information, or just not having access to it, further changes the way we think about similar questions.

On the regulatory committees side, we hope that our work will help inform the way such committees are designed. This may include how the committees are composed, rules on what type of information they receive, and recommendations on when they can call a vote. While actual changes to committee design may take time, our findings have potential to help improve decision-making: for example, have products been approved that should not have been, and is that due to the way committees are designed?

Why did you join the Economics department at Warwick?

The Economics Department at Warwick is an incredibly dynamic, stellar, and vibrant community for economics. In fact, I was already familiar with much of the work being done at Warwick, especially within my research fields. There is world-leading research being done across the Department and in many fields. I can interact with cutting-edge theoretical and empirical, applied and technical research, with amazing colleagues and staff. This dynamism is also present through the ambitious work conducted by both staff and students, active visitor series, opportunities for presentations and conferences, among others.

An essential part of Warwick’s edge, though, is its collegiality: staff and students are incredibly warm, providing an environment that is ideal to collaborate. This allows us to exchange ideas across fields and methods which, I think, really helps break ground on new contributions. I am particularly grateful to all colleagues, support staff and students who have made me feel so welcome. All in all, Warwick is a very exciting place to be in and I am looking forward to contributing!

Nathan Canen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics. View his staff profile.

Dr Dita Eckardt joined the Department of Economics, University of Warwick in August 2021. Here she discusses her work on training and skills in the labour market and what attracted her to join the Department.

What research projects are you currently involved with?

My research focuses on policy-relevant topics in labour economics, and I am particularly interested in questions around workers’ training and skills. I also do methodology work in applied econometrics, with the goal of applying new methods to empirical questions in labour and applied microeconomics more broadly.

The aim of my current work in labour economics is to better understand what kind of skills workers require to work in different occupations, how they acquire these skills, and how flexible they are in their choice of occupation after training in a particular field.

To make progress on these questions, I have been working with data from the German apprenticeship system. This is a context where young workers get trained in specific occupations, so it is straightforward to see whether a worker has ended up in the occupation they got trained in or not.

The first question I wanted to address is whether moving to an occupation different from one’s training means that workers earn less, potentially because they lack some of the skills relative to their co-workers with the ‘right’ training. Interestingly, it turns out that there is such a penalty, and that the penalty grows the more different the tasks in the occupation are to those in the original training. At the same time, the workers who switch out of their field are particularly good at what they move into. Intuitively, they compensate for their lack of training with more occupation-specific ability.

Why did you choose this research field?

My initial motivation to choose this research field was very much a genuine interest in finding answers to the question of what happens if workers are trained in one field but work in another. I became interested in this topic while studying as an undergraduate in the UK. I noticed how many of my friends were studying specific subjects with the intention of later entering occupations in other fields. This got me thinking about the specificity of skills that students learn and what this implies for flexibility in the labour market.

The fact that there are important implications for real-life policy was another key motivation.

Once I started digging deeper, I also realised that there were a range of interesting econometric challenges associated with this research field. In particular, workers are not randomly assigned to a training or an occupation, and they make their training and occupation choice based on characteristics that are unobservable to the researcher. It is important to find ways to address this kind of selection in the econometric analysis. Given that there are many trainings and occupations to choose from, this is a very challenging exercise.

I believe it is this combination of important big-picture questions and technical challenge that I have enjoyed while working in the field.

What impact do you hope your research will have on society?

There are several policy implications from the findings in my work. In particular, my findings have shown that many workers cannot fully put their skills to use in their current occupation, and that not having the right training can lead to lower productivity and wages.

A concrete policy implication from this is that retraining programmes may be worthwhile for some of these workers. In fact, it turns out that many workers choose an occupation different from their training relatively early on in their work lives. These individuals have many years in the labour market ahead of them and as a result, retraining programmes can pay off, even though there are sizeable short-run costs to retraining.

Another policy angle is around the reasons behind choosing a type of training that is no longer optimal later on. One important factor is unexpected changes in the labour market, which may lead to better opportunities in other occupations. Another factor is a lack of information about one’s own skills when choosing training. A key question relating to this is to what extent government programmes (such as internship programmes and workshops) could support young workers in making better choices, leading to less switching at a later stage. I am hoping that my research will help inform this debate.

What are you planning to work on next?

My next steps in this line of research are to take the findings and explain other phenomena in the labour market. For instance, young workers graduating into worse macroeconomic conditions have been shown to suffer from persistent wage losses. I am interested in analysing to what extent the inability to match their skills to the right occupations can explain these findings.

Besides follow-up projects within the context of the German apprenticeship market, I am also planning to start working on related questions in the UK in the near future.

Why did you join the Economics Department at Warwick?

The Economics Department at Warwick offers a great working environment. The quality of research in my broad field of applied microeconomics is excellent, and this was definitely an important factor for my choice. Warwick Economics is also a relatively big department, so there are colleagues working in pretty much all areas of economics. This makes it a very vibrant research community. We get many chances to present and discuss our work with colleagues which is particularly great as a junior researcher, as it is these interactions that really make a project develop and improve.

The Department of Economics is also an extremely welcoming workplace. As newcomers this academic year, we have been included in Departmental activities pretty much from day one and we also regularly meet up for social events on and off campus.

Dita Eckardt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics.

See Dr Eckardt's staff profile

Welcome to the Autumn 2019 issue of Advantage.

Welcome to the autumn edition of Advantage Magazine. This autumn we mark the close of our first 10 years of policy-driven research at CAGE, and prepare for a further five years of research and impact funded by the ESRC.

As we transition into a new research phase, we say goodbye to some key figures who have been instrumental in CAGE’s success. Our Director, Nicholas Crafts, steps down this autumn, to be succeeded by Mirko Draca, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. We also say goodbye to Sascha Becker, our Research Director, who is replaced by Bishnupriya Gupta, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick.

We are delighted that Nick, Mirko and Sascha have all contributed to this issue. Mirko investigates the polarisation of political ideologies amongst citizens. He finds that the presence of anarchic ideologies- those which reject the authority of key institutions- is considerable, but uncovers surprising evidence about how these ideologies have developed; Nick assesses the reasons for the productivity slowdown in the UK, and considers what this might mean for the UK’s future; while Sascha delves into history to examine the relationship between Protestantism and suicide in 19th Century Prussia.

Our final articles in this issue are also provided by key figures within the Centre. Daniel Sgroi, one of our Research Theme Leaders, describes his laboratory research, which analyses the effect of good mood on workplace productivity; while Arun Advani, CAGE’s Impact Director, investigates why, in the UK, around 6% of tax revenue remains uncollected each year and what can be done to tackle this problem.

In his final Parting Shot as Director, Nicholas Crafts considers whether the current optimism for the future UK productivity is justified.

We hope you find these articles enjoyable and encourage you to explore our website for more information on our evolving research programme. Advantage Autumn 2019!

View Autumn 2019 issue

About CAGE

Established in January 2010, the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) is a research centre in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick

The Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy produces a wide range of publications which are available to download from the Centre’s website.

Welcome to the Spring 2019 issue of Advantage.

The magazine of the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.

Our research, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) addresses issues related to improving living standards, raising productivity, maintaining global competitiveness and facilitating economic well-being.

In this issue, Chris Anderson looks at the diverging opinions of Leavers and Remainers about our economy and compares this state of affairs with the US after Trump’s election. He explores the ideas of whether this really makes a difference? Do voters change their economic behaviour after a vote? And is their economic behaviour politically motivated?

Conversely, Mark Harrison looks at another superpower, the former Soviet Union, on the eve of the Second World War, and talks about his latest publication: The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 7: The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937–1939 (co-written by R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk, and S. G. Wheatcroft). In it, he shows how official statistics exaggerated the growth of the economy and the population, and concealed how low productivity and living standards persisted.

Back in the UK, in his article on bus travel, Michael Waterson tells us how the increased cost in bus fares is leading to fewer people using these crucial public services. These declining numbers and deteriorating local government subsidies is leading to passengers increasingly having to shoulder the operating costs. From here, we move to the online world. Specifically social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and politicians’ have used it to micro-target voters. Looking mainly at the US, Michela Redoano shows how Facebook ads have been successfully used in elections to inform and ultimately persuade voters. So, can we trust governments? Specifically can we trust them to spend revenues they receive in ways that improve the welfare of their citizens? And do they spend tax revenues and non-tax revenues in different ways? Lucie Gadenne answers these questions and more in her article starting on page 19.

Lastly, we also publish an article by Ashok Manandhar, who was the winner of our 2019 essay writing competition. His article, a summary of Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda’s working paper, shows how, using a variety of novel data sources, the authors piece together a picture of working class migration to Paris, and the changes wrought by the expansion of the railways.

We hope you find this issue enjoyable and informative!

View Spring 2019 issue

About CAGE

Established in January 2010, the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) is a research centre in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick

The Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy produces a wide range of publications which are available to download from the Centre’s website.

Welcome to the Spring 2018 issue of Advantage.

The magazine of the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.

Our research, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) addresses issues related to improving living standards, raising productivity, maintaining global competitiveness and facilitating economic well-being.

In this issue, Aditi Dimri looks at the power brokers in Indian Households examining who has the most influence in household decisions and her findings challenge conventional wisdom.

Moving to South America, Thiemo Fetzer shows that insecurity of property rights over land in the Brazilian Amazon is a major driver behind land-related civil conflict and a contributing fact to deforestation.

Bishnupriya Gupta in her article on new insights about the causes of India’s decline and growth over the long run finds that an underinvestment in agriculture and a failure to invest in primary school education had far more serious consequences for Economic growth rather than unfair competition from British goods.

Michael McMahon looks at how simplifying communications from central banks to the general public would affect public expectations such that they move more closely into alignment with the Bank’s forecasts.

Does it pay to get a degree and does class of degree matter? These issues are considered by Robin Naylor and Jeremy Smith. They find that as the number of workers with degrees has expanded, so has the earnings premium associated with a good degree class.

View Spring 2018 issue

About CAGE

Established in January 2010, the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) is a research centre in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick

The Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy produces a wide range of publications which are available to download from the Centre’s website.