As incoming chair of the Faculty of Economics Professor Leonardo Felli has faced unprecedented challenges, and his first year would be unusual year in every possible way. In an interview with Rebecca Heath, he explains how the current pandemic has triggered several changes in the Faculty, including a transition to online learning and the introduction of social distancing restrictions.

A Faculty of Economics academic has won a consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premiere funding organisation for frontier research.

A University of Cambridge academic is warning the global recession is likely to be long lasting, with no country escaping the impact of Covid-19 regardless of their mitigation strategy.

A University of Cambridge academic suggests that the Government should look at the options for free school meals for children in the holidays, as an initiative to level nutritional inequalities.

Regional heterogeneity, short economic memory and the Covid-19 effect A new method of forecasting the US presidential race appears to show the Democrats will win the popular vote. The forecast is tight, but indicates voters have a short memory of seismic economic events over the past few years.

New research shows that younger women are likely to bear more of the economic impact of Covid, as the UK appears to be entering a second wave of the pandemic.

The UK in a Changing Europe, supported by Cambridge-INET, is organising a one-day virtual conference on the Economics of Brexit for Early Career Researchers (untenured assistant professors, postdocs, and PhD students) to take place on the 22nd September 2020, via Zoom. The deadline for submissions is 4th September 2020.

The Faculty is delighted to announce that Emma Taylor from Pembroke College has won the Ellen McArthur prize for best dissertation in Economic History. Emma's dissertation on 'Spatial autocorrelation and its impact on the validity of persistence studies' was selected as the best contribution to economic history submitted this year, in either the Faculty of Economics or the Faculty of History.

Dr. Weilong Zhang and Xiaomeng Li (MPhil Student) have just published a Special Feature on The COVID-19 Economic Research website about "Pandemic Personalities: How do People React to Lockdown?", which explores whether a persons personality traits have an effect on their response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Professor Giancarlo Corsetti has had a chapter published in CEPR's ebook "COVID-19 in Developing Economies". The chapter "Emerging Market Currency Risk Around 'global disasters': Evidence from the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 Crisis" (joint with Simon Lloyd (Bank of England) and Emile Marin (PhD Candidate))

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta's interim report of his independant global review on the Economics of Biodiversity has been published by the HM Treasury. The Review was commissioned last year by HM Treasury and is supported by an Advisory Panel drawn from public policy, science, economics, finance and business.

Professor Vasco Carvalho working with economists at University of Edinburgh, Imperial College and at the Spanish bank BBVA, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, studies the "real time evolution" of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Christopher Rauh (joint with former PhD student Teodora Boneva, Abi Adams-Prassl and Marta Golin) has just published two working papers looking at the economic impacts of COVID-19 on workers in the UK and US.

Paper proposals are invited for the 51st Annual Conference of the Money Macro and Finance Society, from academic, government and business economists in any area of monetary, macro and financial economics. The conference will be held at Clare College, Cambridge, on 1st-3rd September 2020. The deadline for this call is 15th May 2020.