The Department of Economics is delighted to welcome five new academic staff joining our team this year: Professors Kimberley Scharf and Ganna Pogrebna and lecturers Dr. Wanyu Chung, Dr. Zhihua Li and Dr. Rebecca McDonald.
Professor Kimberley Scharf is the Editor-in-Chief of International Tax and Public Finance, Elected Member of Council of the Royal Economic Society, Elected Member of the Royal Economic Society's Women's Committee, and Elected Member of the Board of Management of the International Institute for Public Finance. She was previously a Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. Her main research interests are in the area of Public Economics, Political Economy and Applied Microeconomic Theory.
Before joining the department, Professor Ganna Pogrebna was an Associate Professor of Decision Science and Service Systems at Warwick Manufacturing Group. She studied Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City (US) and the University of Innsbruck (Austria). Ganna holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Social Sciences. She is interested in analysing individual and group decision-making under risk and uncertainty (ambiguity) using laboratory experiments, field experiments and non-experimental data.
Dr. Wanyu Chung joined the University of Birmingham in September 2017, having previously worked as a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Sheffield and as a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. She obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick in 2014. Her research interests lie in the broad fields of international trade, international economics, and international macroeconomics.
Prior to joining the department, Dr. Zhihua Li worked as a Leverhulme research fellow at Behavioural Science Group, University of Warwick. She employs experimental methods, develops experiment programs and analyses data sets to better understand economic models and its psychological underpinnings, generating insights to inform theory as well as real world decision makers. Her research interests are mainly within the field of behavioural economics and experimental economics. She takes special interests not only in testing economic theories in the environment of imperfect decision makers but also in applying rational theories to improve decision-making quality.
Dr Rebecca McDonald was previously a Leverhume Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She is an Associate of the Network for Integrated Behavioural Science. Rebecca obtained her PhD in Economics at the Newcastle University for research on "Context and Latency Effects in the Value of Preventing a Statistical Cancer Fatality".