The Faculty's Dr Victoria Bateman has taken part in a new BBC Radio 4 economics series, called “Understand: the economy”, presented by Tim Harford. The series details everything you need to know about the economy and what it means for you. The programme cuts through the jargon to bring you clarity and ensure you finally understand all those complicated terms and phrases you hear on the news. Inflation, GDP, Interest rates, bonds - Victoria Bateman takes part, and explains the history of these financial indicators.
The series is available on BBC iplayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dwr0
On Oct 13th, Dr Bill Janeway delivered a talk about "The Necessity of Bubbles" as part of the History Faculty's Economic and Social History Seminar Series.
Bubbles are ubiquitous wherever assets are traded: from tulip bulbs to cryptocurrencies. But not all bubbles are the same. Occasionally, the focus of speculation is one of those transformational technologies which, when, which when deployed at scale, actually does create a ‘new economy’.
Watch the video: https://www.janeway.econ.cam.ac.uk/event/necessity-bubbles
We are delighted to welcome to the Faculty, Professor Peter Bossaerts, who is now the Leverhulme International Professor of Neuroeconomics at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Economics.
Professor Bossaerts’ unique work has studied how the brain makes decisions, in part by using brain scanners to examine what is going through a person’s mind when they are presented with complex decisions, thereby helping establish the novel fields of neuroeconomics and decision neuroscience. He is now recruiting his research team, and we will bring you more on his exciting work as it progresses.
The Faculty is celebrating after many of our students have won multiple awards:
Alastair Langtry, a University of Cambridge student at the Faculty of Economics, has been awarded the 2022 EEA Young Economist Award, for his paper “Keeping up with ‘The Joneses’: reference dependent choice with social comparisons”.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news/langtry-young-economist-award
Jerome Simons, a University of Cambridge Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Economics has been awarded the 2022 Edgeworth prize for the outstanding DPhil thesis in Economics for his thesis titled “Cointegration without unit roots”.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news/simons-wins-edgeworth-prize-2022
Alessa Widmaier has received the Martin Beckmann RSAI (Regional Science Association International) Award for the best paper published in Papers in Regional Science in 2021 for the article 'The Persistent Pay Gap between Easterners and Westerners in Germany: A Quarter-Century after Reunification'.
https://www.regionalscience.org/index.php/awards/martin-beckmann-rsai-annual-award.html
The Faculty's Niklas Schmitz has won three awards for his paper that looked at why stock markets react to monetary policy decisions. His paper takes a particular look at recessions and proposes one reason: In crisis times, monetary policy actions can affect the probability of bad macroeconomic outcomes for the near future.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news/schmitz-wins-three-awards
Eu-Wayne, who has just completed the final year of the BA in Economics, has been jointly awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize for his dissertation ‘Beyond the law’s borders: Evidence on what shapes judicial decisions from U.S. immigration cases’.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news/eu-wayne-gladstone-memorial-prize-winner
Debopam Bhattacharya has been awarded a 4-year ESRC standard grant of approximately £800,000 for his research into Econometric Demand and Welfare Analysis, in collaboration with Dr Kai Liu.
The project aims to develop novel econometric tools for cost-benefit analysis of such interventions using micro-level data. These tools will be useful both for understanding the nature of consumer preferences from observed choice behaviour, and for applying that knowledge to assess existing and potential public policies in terms of their impact on social welfare in a variety of important real-life contexts such as education, housing, healthcare and vacation rentals.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/grants/DWAMD
The 2022-23 Marshall Lecture was given by Professor John Moore from the LSE, who gave two lectures on 'Funding Horizons'. The Marshall Lecture videos are now live on the Faculty YouTube channel.
Lecture 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqnhaXrGsUc
Lecture 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsqdVr5GTtk
Dr. Kamiar Mohaddes's Entrepreneurship Lab has been awarded a generous gift of £1.5 million from David Sainsbury and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, to expand their activities.
Dr Mohaddes, who is an Associate Professor in Economics & Policy at the Judge Business School, and also teaches in the Faculty of Economics, is Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Entrepreneurship Lab, which was established in September 2021.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news-item?item=mohaddes-entrepreneurship-lab-sainsbury-gift-oct-2022
Povilas Lastauskas is starting a new position as Assistant Professor in Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at Queen Mary University of London. Povilas was a PhD student from 2009 to 2014.
At the end of the last Easter term, the Faculty announced that four academics at the Faculty of Economics have been promoted to Professor grades: Sriya Iyer, Matt Elliott, Debopam Battacharya, and Chris Rauh.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news/four-new-professors-in-economics-faculty
Congratulations to distinguished alumna Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff who has received an award from Investment Week magazine, which was delighted to honour the winners of the Women in Investment Awards 2022, in partnership with Amundi ETF, at a special ceremony in London. Simona from BlackRock was a double winner on the night, taking home accolades for Role Model of the Year and Investment Woman of the Year (large firms), and also teaches a module in the Faculty's MPhil in Finance and Economics graduate course, applied to Finance.
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news-item?item=paravani-mellinghoff-investment-award-dec-2022
Assistant Professor Alexander Rodnyansky from the Faculty of Economics has been extensively quoted in the UK’s Guardian Newspaper about the cost of rebuilding Ukraine. An adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he says the war-torn country needed to speed up efforts to reform industries as it looked to rebuild after Russia’s invasion.
Professor Rodnyansky told the Guardian that the Ukrainian government needed to “create the foundations for rapid economic growth” while also financing the conflict.
He is currently based in Ukraine, and in recent weeks has also given interviews to the BBC’s Today programme, and CNN.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/04/ukraine-must-revamp-labour-laws-and-step-up-privatisation-to-fix-economy
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news-item?item=rodnyansky-ukraine-economy-guardian-oct-2022
https://twitter.com/CNNConnect/status/1589592784356376578