Research at the Department of Economics

The Birmingham Experimental Economics Group (BEEG) is based in the Business School at the University of Birmingham. Experiments conducted in our laboratory, the Birmingham Experimental Economics Laboratory (BEEL), focus on research into individual and strategic decision making.

Volunteer to participate

At the BEEL we conduct research into how people make decisions. For that we require the participation of volunteers. No special skills or prior knowledge are required, and most participants will receive a reward (normally cash).

Internal members of BEEG

Group Co-Director: Michalis Drouvelis
Research Interests: Behavioural Economics, Cooperation, Emotions, Altruism, Bargaining, Charitable giving, Social preferences, Leadership

Group Co-Director: Rebecca McDonald
Research Interests: Value of non-market goods, Online privacy, Behavioural information economics, Intertemporal choice, Health

Apurav Bhatiya
Research Interests: Experimental economics and political economy

Danae Arroyos-Calvera
Research Interests: Altruism, Social preferences, Value of life, Intertemporal choice, Information

Sebastian Cortes Corales
Research interests: Social and economic networks from a theoretical and experimental perspective

Federica D'Isanto
Research Interests: Education, Games, Gender

Amalia Di Girolamo
Research Interests: Altruism, Risk Taking, Social Preferences, Children, Education, Field Experiments

Anthony Heyes

Research Interests: Theory, environmental economics, experiments

Kamilya Suleymenova

Research Interests: Pedagogical research, institutions, Artificial Intelligence.

Lab manager: Nicolaus Teng

Honorary members:

Anett John

Research Interests: Development Economics, Behavioural Economics, Time Preferences, Health, Unemployment

Johannes Lohse

Research Interests: Lab Experiments, Cooperation, Charitable Giving, Climate Change, Decision Processes, Social

The Group for Research in Econometrics and Data Science has produced leading research in several fields of economics, econometrics and data science.

The group frequently publishes its research findings in the top international academic journals: American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Econometric Theory, and the Journal of Time Series Analysis among others.

In addition, the group’s activities include frequent seminars with invited speakers from the top academic and policy institutions. Past keynote speakers include for example David Hendry (University of Oxford), Andrew Chesher (UCL), Robert Taylor (University of Essex), Yuriy Gorodnichenko (UC - Berkeley) and Robin Lumsdaine (American University) among others.

Research interests in the group cover a wide range of areas in econometrics, data science, financial economics, corporate finance, banking, crime, education and political economy.

Internal members

Group Director: Marco R Barassi
Research interests: Analysis of non-stationary time series, structural change in time series models, time series with long memory, non-linear time series models with applications to environmental and financial economics.

Group Co-Director: Joanne Ercolani
Research interests: Time series econometrics, estimation of continuous time models.

Anindya Banerjee
Research interests: Factor models, forecasting with large datasets, time-varying structural vector autoregressions, panel data models with integrated series.

Marco Ercolani
Research interests: Applied econometrics, with experience in handling cross-section, panel and time-series data. General research interest is in 'bringing data to theories'.

Livia Menezes
Research interests: Crime, education, health and labour.

James Rockey
Research interests: Political Economy, Productivity and Inequality.

Sasha Talavera
Research interests: Big data, fintech, online price setting, social networks, empirical corporate finance.

Yongli Wang
Research interests: Time series econometrics, forecasting under structural breaks.

External members

Laetitia Lepetit
Research Interests: Banking, microeconometrics.

Yiannis Karavias
Research interests: Econometric theory, panel data, structural change, threshold regression, unit root tests.

The research interests of the group cover a wide range of theoretical and applied topics that include game theory, general equilibrium theory, economic dynamics, financial innovation, economic policy making, political economy and development economics.

Members publish their research in top rated journals and present their work in seminars and in conferences in universities worldwide. The group organises several widely attended internal meetings, workshops and conferences. Members of the group have held several research grants from funding bodies including ESRC, World Bank and British Academy.

Members of the group

Group co-leader: Professor Aditya Goenka
Research interests: Economic fluctuations, economic epidemiology, economic growth, general equilibrium theory, market games.

Group co-leader: Xin Gao
Research interests: Microeconomic theory, information design and mechanism design.

Professor Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay
Research interests: Political economy, the economics of crime and economic evaluation of policy, game theoretic modelling of criminal behaviour.

Sebastian Cortes Corales
Research interests: Social and economic networks from a theoretical and experimental perspective

Dr Michalis Drouvelis
Research interests: Social preferences, voluntary cooperation in the presence of free rider incentive, coordination games, impact of emotions on economic decision-making.

Dr Amalia di Girolamo
Research interests: Field and laboratory experiments with a specific focus on gender differences in risk preferences, public economics, financial literacy and the economics of education.

Dr Rebecca McDonald
Research interests: Behavioural economics, experimental economics, economics of non-market valuation.

Dr Afrasiab Mirza
Research interests: Banking regulation, corporate finance, optimal taxation, mechanism design.

Dr William Pouliot
Research interests: Econometric theory, financial econometrics, labour economics, future economic theory.

External members

Dr Colin Rowat
Research interests: Mechanised reasoning, weak property rights, differential games, microeconomic theory.

Dr Zhihua Li
Research interests: Decision under risk and ambiguity, reference dependent decisions, intertemporal decision making, strategic decision making, rationality and nudge, social influence on decision making.

Dr Johannes Lohse
Research interests: Behavioural economics of climate change, voluntary cooperation in the presence of free rider incentive, the effect of cognitive constraints on economic decision making, social identity and revealed preferences, risk taking.

Members of the Economics Research into Education (ERiE) group are interested in applying economics research methods to the study of teaching, learning and the impact of education.

The group provides a friendly and supportive environment for those who are interested in developing their pedagogical research. The group aims to offer evidence-based policy recommendations to assist the Department of Economics and inform good practice in UK Higher Education more generally. Research methods adopted in the group incorporate both economic theory and econometrics.

Group members

ERiE Group Founder and Leader: Marco Ercolani
Research interests: Education, health, ageing and work

ERiE Co-lead: Vasco Alves
Research interests: Intermediate Microeconomics, Development Economics and Public Economics

Kamilya Suleymenova
Research interests: Education; pedagogical research (with focus on feedback, digital resources/tools, future of HE landscape); institutional economics (also with application to HE sector, but not exclusively), microeconomic theory (political economy, education, entrepreneurship)

Ralph Bailey
Research interests: Education, mathematics, philosophy

Gunes Bebek
Research interests: Empirical international trade, trade and development, regional economics

Federica D'Isanto
Research interests: Education, gender discriminationtion, social inclusion, pro-social behaviour, wellbeing

Ceri Davies
Research interests: Education, macroeconomics, monetary economics, monetary policy

Mary Dawood
Research interests: Assessment, module design, use of IT in teaching

Joanne Ercolani
Research interests: Education, gender pay gap, econometric theory (continuous time modelling, structural time series models)

Panos Fouskas
Research interests: Productivity in education, R&D, assessment in HE

Michael Henry
Research interests: Education, health, poverty and domestic migration

Sharin McDowall-Emefiele
Research interests: Development economics and finance, application of Institutional Theory

Maria Psyllou
Research interests: Economics of education, health economics, pedagogical research

Sultan Salem
Research interests: Education, FDI, contemporary economics hypothesis testing, theoretical and applied econometrics, time series, crime justice & policing, international migration

Thomas Sebastian
Research interests: Globalisation, globalisation of finance, trade

Jacqueline Smith
Research interests: Philosophy and mathematics

Yao Yao
Research interests: Pedagogical research and practices, development economics and applied economics

The Macroeconomics and Finance Research Group has produced leading research in several fields of macroeconomics and finance.

The group frequently publishes its research findings in the top international academic journals: American Economic Review, Journal of Monetary Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, NBER Macroeconomics Annual, The Review of Finance, the Journal of European Economic Association, the Economic Journal and the Journal of Economic Literature, among others.

In addition, the group’s activities include frequent seminars with invited speakers from the top academic and policy institutions and the organisation of elite conferences which bring together academics and decision-makers of the highest level. Past keynote speakers include for example Thomas Lubik (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond), Roger Farmer (UCLA), Michael Woodford (Columbia University) and Klaus Adam (Mannheim). Research interests in the group cover a wide range of areas in macroeconomics and macro econometrics with a particular focus on business cycle dynamics, expectations formation and news shocks, inventory and investment dynamics, as well as monetary and fiscal policy.

Group lead: Professor Kaushik Mitra
Research Interests: Macroeconomics, monetary economics and adaptive learning.

Roger Backhouse
Research Interests: Paul A. Samuelson, History of welfare economics, History of empirical macroeconomics, History of economics (general).

Dr Ceri Davies
Research Interests: Macroeconomics, monetary economics.

Professor David Dickinson
Research Interests: Financial sector reform, financial institutional behaviour.

John Fender
Research Interests: Theoretical Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Fiscal Policy

Professor Alessandra Guariglia
Research Interests: Links between macroeconomic activity and finance, firm behaviour under imperfect capital markets, economics of transition in China, household saving and consumption decisions, health economics.

Domenico Moro
Research Interests: Macroeconomics, Health Economics, Political Economics, Labour economics.

Dr Frank Strobel
Research Interests: Banking, financial intermediation, financial economics.

Oleksandr Talavera
Research Interests: Online prices, social media, online vacancies, central bank communication, house prices.

Dr Yao Yao
Research Interests: Macroeconomics, labour economics.

The Trade, Environment, Development and Energy (TEDE) Research Group is primarily an applied economics and econometrics and applied theory group that does research at the intersection between the four related research areas of international economics, development economics, environmental economics and energy economics.

We also encourage interdisciplinary research that encompasses environmental science, development studies, engineering, international business, computer science, regional studies, human geography, international political economy and area studies.

Specific topics include trade and the environment, energy systems, natural disasters, African development, labour share, institutional economics, the global value chain, the Chinese and Indian economies, the exporting and importing behaviour of firms, spatial econometrics, economics of climate change, the environmental behaviour of firms and much more.

The TEDE group also works closely with the University of Birmingham - VU Amsterdam Big Data and Economics Research Network (BVRN). The BVRN is a network of academics at the University of Birmingham (UoB) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) undertaking data-driven economic analyses of urban, environment, labour and migration-related topics. The BVRN is co-led by Ceren Ozgen from the TEDE group and Hans Koster from VU. 

Dr Edward Pinchbeck (co-lead)
Research Interests: Health, urban and spatial economics, behavioural economics.

Dr Wanyu Chung (co-lead)
Research Interests: International Trade, International Economics, International Macroeconomics

Dr Gunes Bebek
Research Interests: Empirical international trade, trade and development, regional economics.

Dr Allan Beltran
Research Interests: Environmental valuation, the economics of flooding, the economics of climate change in Latin America, climate change and adaptation, environmental fiscal reform.

Dr Sami Bensassi
Research Interests: International Trade and International Security, smuggling/informal trade, institutions and development, return migration.

Dr Apurav Yash Bhatiya
Research Interests: Political economy, development economics and labour economics.

Dr Nana O Bonsu
Research Interests: Net-zero emissions, climate change and transition to electric vehicles, global value chains management & circular economy, sustainable development concerns & social innovation, sustainability & responsible business practices, sustainable cities, transportation & ambient air pollution, natural resources conflicts & management, sustainable forest management & land-use planning, biodiversity & conservation management.

Professor Matthew Cole
Research Interests: Environmental economics, development economics, international economics.

Dr Christian Darko
Research Interests: Labour economics, economics of education.

Professor Robert Elliott
Research Interests: Applied research in any areas of international economics, development economics, environmental and energy economics and international business with a particular interest in the Chinese economy, firm behaviour, natural disasters and the impact of globalisation on the environment.

Dr Francesco Esposito
Research Interests: Labour economics, political economy.

Dr Panagiotis Fouskas
Research Interests: Applied Industrial economics, productivity and competiveness, applied labour economics, well-being and quality of life.

Dr Mike Henry
Research Interests: Empirical analyses of productivity and labour market, effects of trade and investment, liberalisation in developed and developing countries.

Professor Anthony Heyes
Research Interests: Environmental policies and regulations, the impacts of climate and pollution on human well-being, corporate social responsibility.

Dr Liza Jabbour
Research Interests: Business School Group, managerial economics.

Mr Bowen Liu
Research Interests: Environmental economics, development economics, health economics, political economics.

Dr Johannes Lohse
Research Interests: Public economics, environmental economics, behavioral economics.

Professor David Maddison Research Interests: Agricultural economics, climate change, environmental valuation, natural resource economics.

Dr Sharin McDowall-Emefiele
Research Interests: Applied Development Economics and Finance; and Application of Institutional Theory in both Entrepreneurship and International Business.

Eric Melander
Research Interests: Quantitative economics history

Dr Livia Menezes
Research Interests: Economics of crime, economics of education, health economics, labour economics.

Dr Ceren Ozgen
Research Interests: Labour economics: Labour market impacts of international migration and cultural diversity, overeducation and skills mismatch, innovation, human capital and knowledge spillovers, economics of population, migration policy.

Professor James Rockey
Research Interests: Political Economy and Inequality

Professor Eric Strobl
Research Interests: Applied development economics, international economics, environmental economics, labour economics.

Dr Liyun Zhang
Research Interests: International economics and environmental economics.

External members:

Dr Johannes Lohse
Research Interests: Public economics, environmental economics, behavioral economics

There are clear synergies between the TEDE research group and the BCEEEM research cluster at Birmingham Business School. At the University we have a link to the Birmingham Energy and Policy Research (BEPRI) and the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BiFor).