Academic Staff: Research Interests and Topics Relevant to Postgraduate Research Students: 2009-10

Below are the research interests of the staff in the Department of Economics, and economists in other departments who are interested in supervising PhD students registered in the Department of Economics. In some cases, staff members have indicated specific projects which not only interest them but also for which they may have funding for PhD students. Please contact them directly if you are interested.

Supervisor: Dr Sean Barrett
E-Mail: sean.barrett@tcd.ie

• Economics of public policy
• Transport economics

 

Supervisor: Dr Catia Batista
E-Mail: batistac@tcd.ie

Catia Batista joined the Department of Economics in September 2008.  Her research interests lie in the broad field of applied macroeconomics, particularly in the intersection between economic growth and international economics.

Possible areas for student supervision include international migration, capital flows, trade, economic growth, and income inequality.

 

Supervisor: Dr Dudley Cooke
E-Mail:dcooke@tcd.ie

Dudley Cooke joined the Department of Economics in September 2007. He is interested in theoretical and applied issues related to international macroeconomics and monetary economics. Two areas in which he is willing to supervise are the following.

• Monetary Policy Design. How does the policy stance of the central bank affect the economy? Much of the work in this area uses stylized DSGE models which incorporate monopolistic competition and nominal rigidities. In the closed economy, the focus is on discretion versus commitment, and the specification of monetary policy rules; see Woodford (2003). In the open economy, the focus is on the choice of exchange rate regime, as in Devereux and Engel (2003) and Céspedes et al. (2004), and price stability; see Benigno and Benigno (2003) and Devereux and Sutherland (2007).
• Business Cycle Fluctuations. What accounts for observed business cycle fluctuations? An important element in answering this question lies in the design of quantitative DSGE models. For example, in the closed economy, Chari et al. (2000) and Christiano et al. (2005) focus on the implications of monetary shocks. In the open economy, Heathcote and Perri (2002) focus on different asset market structures and technology shocks in explaining volatility in the terms of trade. Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) focus on the volatility in trend growth as the source of business cycle fluctuations in emerging markets.

Supervisor: Dr. Eleanor Denny
Email: dennye@tcd.ie

Eleanor Denny’s area of research interest is in Energy Economics, in particular on the impact of large penetrations of renewables on electricity systems. She is currently supervising/co-supervising PhD students in the following areas:

• The economic viability of large scale energy storage to balance wind generation
• The cost impact of variable renewable generation on the underlying electricity generation portfolio
• The economics of biomass for electricity production
• The distributional impacts of a carbon tax
• Stochastic optimisation of the electricity market with wind generation
• The economics of electric vehicles

 

Supervisor: Dr Vahagn Galstyan
E-Mail: vgalsty@tcd.ie

Vahagn Galstyan joined the Department of Economics in September 2008. His primary field of interest is international macroeconomics, with research concentrating on the determinants of exchange rates.

Supervisor: Professor Philip Lane
E-Mail: plane@tcd.ie

Philip Lane has currently seven PhD students working in the international macroeconomics area. Below are three topics that may interest perspective students.

• Financing Public Investment: A Macro Perspective. In recent years, Europe has been subject to fiscal austerity in order to satisfy the EMU Maastricht criteria. In some fast-growing countries, it may be appropriate to increase the volume of public investment spending. This raises the question: how should public investment be financed? This project will assess the optimality of the Golden Rule (bywhich investment spending should be debt-financed);public-private partnerships; and the idea of a stand-alone investment 'fund'. The analysis will include not only economic factors but due attention will also be helpful in 'ring-fencing' fiscal surpluses from consumption-happy politicians.
• Managing the Public Debt: Is an Independent Agency Appropriate? In Ireland, the public debt is managed by an independent agency (the National Treasury Management Agency). This project will evaluate the pros and cons of delegating this important component of fiscal policy and employ Ireland as a case study. Issues include: coordination problems with the Department of Finance and the Central Bank; setting an appropriate portfolio benchmark; agency issues (optimal incentive structures); and the question of whether assets should be held as well as liabilities.
• Output Volatility Business cycles are more severe in some countries than in others; a one per cent drop in GDP is a rare event in the OECD, yet developing countries often suffer declines in excess of five per cent. This project will study the determinants of volatility in a cross-section of countries, examining the effects of income level; trade openness; country size; output specialization and natural resource endowments, to list just a few relevant factors.

Supervisor: Professor Alan Matthews
E-Mail: Alan.Matthews@tcd.ie

Research interests include agriculture and food policy, agricultural trade policy and the impact of the WTO Doha Development Round, and the relationship between agricultural trade and development.His students are currently working on or have worked on the following range of topics which give a good flavour of his wide research interests.

• the impact of the further trade liberalisation on the Irish economy.
• an evaluation of the use of emergency vaccination as a control measure for foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks
• agricultural policy reform and greenhouse gas emissions
• the evaluation of agricultural research expenditure to improve product quality
• agricultural trade liberalisation and rural income distribution in China
• the implications of Economic Partnership Agreements for Irish Aid partner countries in Africa
• agricultural trade liberalisation and poverty in Uganda

Supervisor: Professor Antoin Murphy
E-Mail: aemurphy@tcd.ie

Specialises in the history of economic thought, particularly the history of monetary thought. Topics of particular interest are:

• Historical analyses of stock market 'bubbles'
• The monetary economics of Henry Thornton

Supervisor: Dr Gaia Narciso
E-Mail:narcisog@tcd.ie

Gaia Narciso joined the Department of Economics in September 2007. She is happy to supervise students in any area of Development Economics. She is currently focusing her research on migration issues and in particular on:

• Role of migration networks in providing information to potential migrants
• Well-being analysis of recent migrants

Supervisor: Dr Carol Newman
E-Mail: newmanc@tcd.ie

Carol Newman specialises in applied microeconomics and, in particular, its application to development economics. She is particularly interested in the development experience of Vietnam.

The Vietnamese experience of the last decade presents interesting and relevant research opportunities in the fields of Development Economics, Empirical Industrial Organisation and Applied Microeconomics. This research will be conducted in conjunction with the Development Economics Research Group at the University of Copenhagen. Two specific strands of research will be pursued:

• An exploration of the evolution of the industrial sector in Vietnam. This project will involve the use of the Vietnamese Census of Industrial Production and will be supplemented by specific data collected on Small to Medium Sized Enterprises by the Institute of Labour Studies and Social Affairs in the Vietnamese Ministry of Labour.
• Living standards and well-being of households in Vietnam. This project involves the use of the Vietnamese Household Living Standards Surveys and the Vietnamese Access to Resources Surveys to analyse issues in relation to the well-being and living standards of households in Vietnam.

Supervisor: Professor Charles Normand (School of Medicine)
E-Mail: charles.normand@tcd.ie

Charles Normand’s research work specializes in the economics of health and he has at present four PhD students working under his supervision. The topics of possible interest to graduate students are the following.

• Economic impact of population ageing, especially in relation to health services in Ireland. A study currently underway is exploring the impact of demographic change on health and social care in Ireland. This is showing that population ageing is likely to be less important than other socio-economic factors such as rising incomes and expectations. Some new data will be soon available from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA).
• There may also be opportunities to work on economic aspects of chronic disease management and equity in finance and access to health care.

There may be funding for one studentship through the Health Research Board Scholar Programme in Health Services Research. In other cases those with funding might still opt to take the taught programme for the Scholar Programme.

Supervisor: Professor John O’Hagan
E-mail: johagan@tcd.ie

John O’Hagan’s research interests relate to the economics of the arts and culture, using quantitative and case study methods. He has currently five PhD students working in this area, two on the estimation of demand/participation functions for the performing arts and the other on patterns and causes of clustering of visual artists and composers by work location. The areas of research where research funding might be forthcoming are the following.

• Clustering and innovation. Do the more important artists (visual, literary, composers) tend to cluster in certain geographic locations, historically and today? If so, why do they cluster at all and what is the evidence for this? And why the specific locations? This work will involve using large on-line dictionaries of art and knowledge of either German or Italian would be useful. It is hoped to be able to test most of the explanations using regression analysis and some ‘creative’ work will be required to uncover the data that will allow this to happen.
• Econometric estimation of determinants of participation in and willingness to pay for the arts. There is access to large data sets for this work, both national and international. As such, this work will involve detailed multivariate and statistical analysis. It will also develop new ways of trying to measure the connection, if any, between active participation and social cohesion and well-being, a topic of considerable interest to many European governments.

Supervisor: Professor Kevin O’Rourke
E-Mail: kevin.orourke@tcd.ie

Supervises students doing research in economic history, and particularly on the history of the international economy. Interested students should approach him with potential thesis topics.

Supervisor: Dr Francis O'Toole
E-Mail: fotoole@tcd.ie

• Microeconomics
• Taxation
• Industrial organization theory

Supervisor: Dr Paul Scanlon
E-Mail:scanlop@tcd.ie

Paul Scanlon is happy to supervise students focusing on any area of macroeconomics, broadly construed. Two areas in particular interest him, as follows.

• There has been a lot of debate on the US/European differential in average hours per person (and worker), since Edward Prescott’s (2002) study on the topic. However, there has been comparatively little work on trends within countries. In particular, does the average discrepancy arise from differentials across high income workers or low income workers, or is it uniform across all income levels? One paper that touches on these issues is "Understanding Growth and Inequality Trends: The Role of Labor Supply in the USA and Germany” by Lars Osberg, but this is an area that is a fruitful topic for research.
• An empirical paper "Does Inflation Targeting Matter?” by Lawrence Ball and Niamh Sheridan, examines the effects of inflation targeting on real and nominal variables. Basically, they find small effects, claiming that any positive effects of inflation targeting would have happened in any case. However, there is little reason to believe this to be the case – inflation is notoriously persistent. Given the relevance and importance of the topic, and more data since the initial study, a revision of this study seems timely and worthwhile.

Supervisor: Dr Andrew Somerville
E-Mail: andrew.somerville@tcd.ie

• Theoretical and applied microeconomics
• Financial economics

Supervisor: Dr Jacco Thijssen
E-Mail: thijssej@tcd.ie

My main research interests are in mathematical economics & finance and game theory. In particular general equilibrium theory, real options theory, and evolutionary game theory. I would be happy to supervise students with strong backgrounds in mathematics (or a willingness and ability to acquire the appropriate tools) and a specific interest in economic theory. Topics of special interest include the following.

• (Non-exclusive) real options. The real options methodology views investment projects as equivalent to American options: you have the right, but not the obligation, to make an investment. Their valuation and exercise decision are obtained by using techniques from continuous time option pricing techniques. Many real options are, however, non-exclusive, contrary to their financial counterparts. This requires a combination of stochastic calculus with game theory and is still in its infancy. My main interest is currently in the development of the appropriate tools. Possible applications are an analysis of FDI, environmental policies, industry dynamics, mergers & acquisitions, etc. Also, research into more general underlying stochastic processes, particularly in relation to incomplete markets (imperfect hedging) is possible. In particular, I am interested in the effects of unhedgeable catastrophes on optimal investment policies.
• Non-Redundant Options in General Equilibrium with Incomplete Markets. Most of option pricing theory assumes that markets are complete (all risks are traded) and that, hence, options are redundant. Their value can then be obtained by computing the value of the (unique) replicating portfolio. When markets are incomplete, however, options can be non-redundant. Furthermore, their payoffs depend on the (endogenously determined) price of the underlying asset. I want to study the effects of these two defining properties of options on the structure of equilibria (existence, optimality). Further attention will be paid to computation of equilibria and comparisons with standard option pricing techniques.
• Infinite Horizon Models with Incomplete Markets. Many models in macroeconomics use intertemporal general equilibrium models (OLG, DSGE). Many of these models assume markets to be complete. With incomplete markets all sorts of new equilibrium phenomena can occur. Several topics that are of interest in such models are “rational expectations vs learning”, “production in infinite horizon models”, “economic survival”, “pensions in incomplete markets”, and many more.
• Evolution of cooperation and competition. Many models in the field of evolutionary game theory try to explain cooperation in human interaction as resulting from evolutionary fitness. Most models show that cooperation arises in a so-called monomorphic population, i.e. a population where every member behaves in the same way. I am interested in exploring whether a certain level of selfishness – or even spitefulness – could arise in the long-run in societies. The argument would be that having a certain small percentage of deviants from cooperation keeps the population “sharp” and ensures a certain stability.

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Supervisor: Dr Pedro Vicente
E-Mail: vicentep@tcd.ie

Pedro Vicente joined the Department of Economics in September 2008. His research lies on the intersection of Development Economics and Political Economy, with both theoretical and empirical components, and a clear emphasis on Africa. He has been particularly interested on the microeconomics of:

• Corruption in public services – where perceptions and direct measurements have been contrasted and related to the ‘natural resource curse’;
• Electoral behaviour – namely the causes and consequences of vote buying, intimidation and ballot fraud;
• Conflict – specifically, violence related to elections;
• Social Networks – i.e. their role in informational, grassroot campaigns;
• Aid – where his focus has been on the determinants of donor international aid preferences.

To tackle the empirical dimension of these issues, Pedro has been designing and conducting fieldwork, embedding primarily household surveys and field experiments, in Cape Verde, Kenya, Nigeria, and Sao Tome and Principe.

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Supervisor: Dr Michael Wycherley
E-Mail: wycherlm@tcd.ie

Michael Wycherley joined the Department of Economics in September 2007. His research interests are in macroeconomics and economic growth, with particular emphasis on technological innovation and adoption, and he is happy to advise students in these areas.

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