The research interests of the group are wide-ranging, encompassing topics in development, industrial, labour and public economics, as well in migration research and public finance. Common to this high-quality body of work is the objective to develop and apply state-of-the-art empirical techniques to analyse substantive empirical issues. In particular, over the past three years, the group has generated research funding in excess of £1.5 million.
Members of the group have recently published papers in the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Econometrics, the International Economic Review, the Econometrics Journal and the Journal of Applied Econometrics, as well as in top field journals such as the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Public Economics.
The following overview showcases the variety of our research interests. Some common themes, supported by collaborative research grants, are the economics of prosocial behaviour and migration research.
- Hector Calvo's main research interests are in international trade and household finance. He considers the consequences of agents' forward-looking behaviour in both settings (Dow do firms break into foreign markets? Do households' subjective expectations on stock market returns explain their decision to invest). He also works on the effect of migration on political institutions in open economies.
- Thomas Gall's primary research interest lies in the organization of production in an economy, identifying potential mis-allocation and dynamic consequences touching issues in development economics and applied micro theory, in particular matching, contracts, and organization.
- Emanuela Lotti's main research area is in development, macroeconomics and labour mobility. In particular, she looks at the impact of international migration and remittances on growth and labour markets and at the causes and effects of informal labour markets. She has also conducted work in health economics and the economics of incentives and insurance, and policy-oriented research on the economic impact of migration in UK for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR).
- Emmanuil Mentzakis' research interests are health economics, choice modelling, contingent valuation, applied econometrics and experimental economics.
- Jose Olmo's main research interests are in financial economics, financial econometrics, and more recently, monetary economics. In particular, in financial economics, he studies asset pricing models under nonlinearities given by threshold regimes, life-cycle consumption and investment behaviour under time-varying subjective expectations and lifetime budget constraints. In financial econometrics, his main interest is in proposing methods for forecasting and assessing market risk measures such as Value-at-Risk and the modelling of high-frequency data. In monetary economics he is currently looking at the impact of unconventional monetary policies on the optimal supply of credit by commercial banks and their influence on determining equilibrium interest rates.
- Carmine Ornaghi works on empirical industrial organisation and applied econometrics. Specific interests include economics of innovation, empirical modelling of productivity growth, M&As and the pharmaceutical industry.
- Helen Paul's research interests are in economic history: financial revolution, slavery, naval history, Atlantic history and cliometrics. She particularly specialises in the early modern period and her work includes a book on the South Sea Bubble (a financial market crash of 1720). She is also interested in popular perceptions of finance. She supervises PhD students in the History department and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
- Christian Schluter is an applied econometrician with interests in distributional analysis and, more recently, migration research. More specifically, he has worked extensively on the econometrics of inequality (eg improved inference in presence of heavy tails and measurement error), and applications of extreme value theory. Current migration research projects include estimations of migrant and local social network effects on labour market outcomes.
- Mirco Tonin's research interests are in labour economics and public finance. His current research looks at the impact of in-work benefit on educational choices, the effect of information campaigns on water consumption, and the enforcement of import tariffs.
- Michael Vlassopoulos' work covers both applied micro- and macro-economics, as well as public economics. In particular, recent work studies the link between historical climate and development, and investigates peer effects with endogenous reference groups. In joint work with Mirco Tonin, he examines the sources and implications of prosocial behaviour.
- Jackie Wahba's research areas are development and labour economics. Current work covers: international migration and remittances; internal migration; human capital investment, schooling and child labour; and the impact of economic reforms on LDCs' labour markets.
Over the past three years, members of the group have generated research funding in excess of £1.5 million. In particular, Tonin and Vlassopoulos have collaborated on ESRC-funded research on prosocial behaviour and have conducted experiments to test workers' intrinsic motivation. A one-day workshop at Southampton organised by Mirco and Michael showcased this work. Calvo Pardo's work on forward-looking behaviour is also funded by an ESRC research grant, 'Expected Returns, Limited Asset Market Participation and Background Risk'. Schluter and Wahba have recently won two large research grants on topics in migration research. The latest, 'Temporary Migration and Economic Development: the Triple-Win Policy Vision applied to North Africa', is the subject of a recent ESRC–DFID grant. They also lead an international team of researchers (which includes Calvo Pardo, as well as others outside Southampton) in work funded by a €850,000 grant from NORFACE. Specific projects include an analysis of the impact of labour market dynamics on return-migration, estimations of search-theoretic general equilibrium models to explain wage differentials between natives and immigrants, and several papers on the effects on local social networks on labour market outcomes. Schluter and Wahba are partially funded members on the migration strand of Southampton's interdisciplinary ESRC Research Centre for Population Change.