Research
The Loughborough University Department of Economics has a strong research base. Its staff publish research on a wide range of economic and econometric subjects and their work has been funded by a variety of research bodies.
The research profile of the Department of Economics has expanded rapidly in the last few years with the inflow of several young researchers to join a group of established research leaders.
The department believes that good teaching and research are best informed and carried out by staff who are active in both areas. Unlike some other universities, we do not run a “two-speed” department in which designated “researchers” never meet students, and designated “teachers” never engage in new research.
In the 2007 national research assessment exercise (RAE) the department submitted all 22 members of staff as “research-active”, each with the required 4 publications (fewer, in the case of the department’s “early career” researchers, as required by the rules of the RAE). This strength in depth emphasizes the department’s commitment to research, as well as to the supervision of research students that is fully informed by the current research activities of its staff.
The Department has been awarded '1+3' ESRC recognition for research training for its MSc in Economics and Finance and its PhD programme.
Staff in the Department of Economics carry out a wide range of research. To help focus the research effort the department is organised into 4 broad research areas. However, there is considerable overlap between these research areas and, in practice, most staff are active in several fields.
The 4 major areas of research in the department are listed below. You can click on the link to find out more about the department's activities in each area.
BANKING AND FINANCE
MACROECONOMICS
MICROECONOMICS AND INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION
ECONOMETRICS
For convenience, each member of staff is listed under one research area. However, most staff are active in several difference research areas. Therefore if you are interested in the work of one particular member of staff click on any individual to link to their relevant research activities
In each of the main research areas, there is a cluster of PhD students, and part of the Department's research strategy is to recruit PhD research postgraduates in clusters that are specialisms of the research groups.
Current PhD clusters are in international macroeconomics, efficiency and productivity analysis, industrial organization, time series econometrics, and financial markets and company finance. The Department has over 30 full-time PhD research students and all of the staff are involved in supervision.
The Department has benefited from substantial research funding in recent years, especially from the research councils and the financial sector. Major projects in macroeconomics and in financial institutions in transition economies have been funded by ESRC and DFID, and smaller individual projects have been supported by the major UK banks and building societies, the World Bank, the IMF, the UN and the European Union, particularly under its ACE/Phare programme. Conference papers have been given at the major international economic research meetings including American Economic Association, Canadian Economics Association, Econometric Society, Economic Science Association, European Association for Research in Industrial Economics, European Economic Association, European Economics and Finance Society, Financial Management Association, Industrial Organization Society, International Atlantic Economic Association, International Network for Economic Research, Money, Macro and Finance Research Group, Royal Economic Society, Schumpeter Society, Scottish Economic Society, Western Economic Association, European, North American and Asian Workshops on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis and at many more specialised conferences.
The Department of Economics publishes all of its research papers on the web under the auspices of REPEC, and all of the discussion papers are in Adobe Acrobat format. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader you can download it for free by following this link.
BANKING AND FINANCE
Staff active in the banking and finance area:
Prof Chris Green, Prof Max Hall, Dr Lawrence Leger, Prof David Llewellyn, Dr Richard Simper
Research Projects in banking and finance:
Research projects in banking and finance in the department in recent years have included the following:
- Banking and financial regulationProfitability analysis of financial institutions
- Efficiency measurement of financial firms
- Economies of scale in banking, and bank mergers
- Competition and structural change in financial systems
- Securitisation
- Comparative banking
- Banking and financial crises
- Financial reform in emerging markets
- Deposit insurance schemes
- Analysis of stock market prices: stock price decompositions, market efficiency
- Financial derivatives: pricing of index futures
- Asset pricing and volatility transmission
- Behavioural finance
- Flow of funds analysis
- Company financial decisions in emerging markets: ownership issues, business groups and family firms
- Behavioural finance
- Company capital structure, dividends and tax
- Bank capital adequacy assessment
| Researcher | Subject Areas |
Principal Supervisor |
|---|---|---|
| Paul Alagidede | Test of Stock Market Efficiency in Emerging African Economies: An Empirical Study | Mills |
| Ye Bai | International Portfolio Diversification | Green |
| Galiya Benson | The Impact of Capital Market Liberalisation on the Cost of Equity Capital | Green |
| Silvio Camilleri | Stock Market Microstructure: Studies of the National Stock Exchange Index | Green |
| Yue Cheng | Taxes and Capital Structure : Studies of EU Companies | Green |
| Mete Feridun | Financial Crises in Emerging Markets | Llewellyn |
| Fei Jiang | Initial Public Offerings (IPO) : Structure and Determinants | Green |
| Karligash Kenjegalieva | Banking Efficiency and Productivity Analysis in Transition Countries | Weyman-Jones |
| Geetha Ravishankar | Efficiency of Bank Mergers in Developing Markets: Case Study of India | Weyman-Jones |
| Zhi Shen | Production and Efficiency Analysis in Banking Sector | Weyman-Jones |
| Chenguang Shi | Volatility Transmission in Asian Stock Markets | Green |
| Juan Tao | Financial Futures | Green |
| Guanqun Tong | Corporate Governance and Company Peformance | Green |
| Wei Wei Yang | Bank Efficiency and Profitability | Simper |
| Yihan Xu | Behavoural Finance : Share Prices in China | Green |
Overview of Research Activities in Banking and Finance 2001-07
In this period, Hall was awarded grants to study Japanese banking (from The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and the British Academy) and he held a Visiting Research Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Several publications followed, including Journal of Banking and Finance (2003) and Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money (2007). He also participated with Simper in a project funded by the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, results of which were published in Journal of Banking and Finance (2006). Hall is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance and the Journal of International Banking Regulation.
Llewellyn was a consultant with a DFID-funded Finance and Development programme and contributed a chapter to an edited collection of survey papers. He has received research grants from The Personal Investment Authority and The Building Societies Trust, as a result of which, he has published papers and policy-related reports for these bodies. He is also a member of the editorial board of Banking and Information Technology, the Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance and the Journal of International Banking Regulation.
Green has been involved in two large research networks. He was co-ordinator of two successive EU ACE/Phare contracts, and two papers from these were published in the Emerging Markets Review (2001). This work led to the development of an extensive network of European colleagues in 8 EU countries working broadly on finance and banking issues in transition and developing economies. This group obtained a further ACE/PHARE contract led by J. de Haan (Groningen). Green was a partner in this and published two further papers (in Journal of Emerging Markets Finance; and a chapter in a collection of papers edited for SUERF by Balling, Lierman, and Mullineux). He was a partner with other UK universities in a DFID-funded programme on finance and development which was completed in 2002. At Loughborough, this programme funded two research students (flow of funds and company finance) who completed their PhDs in 2003 and 2004, and a full-time research assistant. The programme’s remit was to produce applied, policy-oriented work on specific countries. Following this work, Green published (jointly with other project-members) 14 refereed papers, 2 papers in professional journals, an edited collection of survey papers aimed at professionals and graduate students (of which he contributed 4 chapters), and has co-edited 2 journal special issues (Journal of International Development, 2002; and European Journal of Finance, 2008). A substantial amount of applied work was carried out studying financial issues in developing countries, including studies of India, Kenya and Zimbabwe (published in South Asian Economic Journal, The African Finance Journal and Journal of African Business). The programme was commended by DFID’s external auditors for value-for-money and policy relevance. Green and his collaborators presented papers at a Manchester University conference celebrating 50 years of development economics and policy, following publication of Sir Arthur Lewis’s 1954 paper on growth with unlimited labour, and published an invited paper on financing small and medium enterprises in a special issue of the Journal of International Development, celebrating 50 years of development economics. This research programme helped create a further research network including the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and the African Economic Research Consortium.
Relationships with Business, Professional and Other Users of Research
The department has extensive links with research users in banking and finance. Green worked with DFID during the finance and development programme (with Birmingham and Manchester), and has developed several relationships with research users, particularly the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and the African Economic Research Consortium where Green is programme adviser and examiner with the pan-African Collaborative PhD Programme. Hall’s internationally-recognised work on bank regulation has led to him acting as advisor to several central banks (Indonesia, Japan, People’s Republic of China) and he was invited to a conference on “Managing the Procyclicality of the Financial System: Experience in Asia” organised by the IMF and The Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research. He also chaired the Central Bank Governors’ session at the September 2003 International Conference on Islamic Banking: Risk Management, Regulation and Supervision in Jakarta. With Simper he is also part of a joint research programme with Bank Indonesia analysing the efficiency of Indonesian banks.
Llewellyn is an internationally-recognised expert on financial regulation and compliance, corporate governance and competition in financial services; and he has published considerable policy and practice-based research for professionals in these areas. He has acted as consultant and adviser to numerous financial bodies world-wide including: the Jamaica National Building Society; the Central Banks of Austria and of Kazakhstan; De Nederlandsche Bank; the South African Reserve Bank; and the South African Ministry of Finance. He is a member of the Advisory Panels of Bank Indonesia and the Italian Bankers Association. He is a member of the IMF’s International Advisory Panel on governance of financial supervisory agencies, and in 2006 he participated in a World Bank mission to Egypt as advisor on financial regulation. He was a member of the IESE team which conducted an EU-funded study of bank pricing and competition in the EU, reporting in 2007. In the UK, he was consultant to and wrote a commissioned paper for the Myners enquiry on the governance of mutual life offices; he has acted as adviser to: the Competition Commission and the Financial Services Authority; and he was formerly the Public Interest Director on the Board of the Personal Investment Authority. His outstanding reputation in the academic and business community was cemented by his appointment in 1997 as president of the European Society for Research in Finance (SUERF), the European Money and Finance Forum, a post he held for much of the 2001-07 period. During his tenure he built new relationships between the academic and financial communities across Europe (especially commercial and central banks), and SUERF hosted a series of conferences on key monetary and financial issues.
MACROECONOMICS
Staff active in the macroeconomics area
Dr Bettina Becker, Dr Thanaset Chevapatrakul, Prof Eric Pentecost, Dr Maria-Eliza Spaliara, Dr Juan Paez-Farrell Dr Gregory James
Research Projects in macroeconomics
Research projects in macroeconomics in the department in recent years have included the following:
- Demand for money
- Techniques and operation of monetary policy
- Analysis of business cycles
- Finance and economic development
- Foreign direct investment
- Term structure of interest rates
- International capital markets
- Exchange rate economics
- European economic and financial integration
- European Monetary Union
- International financial markets and financial integration
- Currency substitution
- Fiscal policy and fiscal sustainability
- Growth, productivity and development
| Researcher | Subject Areas |
Principal Supervisor |
|---|---|---|
| Ahmad Hassan Ahmad | Exchange Rate Regimes and Macroeconomic Adjustment in Developing Countries | Pentecost |
| Tulio Cravo | Economic Growth Theory, Human Capital and SME's Development Economics | Gourlay |
| Tshokologo Alex Kganetsano | Transmission of Monetary Policy in Botswana | Turner |
| Shahid Malik | Political Economy of Religion and Risk: A case of FDI inflows to Pakistan (1970-2004) | Pentecost |
| Ivaylo Alexandrov Nikolov | Fiscal Sustainability in th EU | Pentecost |
| Simona Rasciute | Foreign Direct Investment | Pentecost |
| Jia Ren | Foreign Direct Investment | Pentecost |
| Marie Michele Stack | Foreign Direct Investment: Trends, Determinants and Policy Implications in Central European Economies | Pentecost |
Overview of Research Activities in Macroeconomics 2001-07
In this period, Pentecost (co-ordinator) completed work on an EU ACE/Phare contract and published a paper with his collaborators in the Journal of Macroeconomics. Pentecost and Mills were joint holders of an ESRC grant concerned with Business Cycle Volatility and Economic Growth. This led to 11 papers in major journals: Bulletin of Economic Research, Emerging Markets Review, Economic Issues, Economic Journal, Economic Modelling, Empirical Economics, Journal of Applied Statistics, Journal of Time Series Analysis, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Review of World Economics. Pentecost was a partner in a project about Labour Market Flexibility in the EU, funded by the National Bank of Belgium. This has yielded publications in Review of World Economics and Journal of Comparative Economics. Richter was awarded a grant by the Austrian Science Foundation to develop a Macroeconomic Model with Rational Expectations for Austria and a further grant by the Jubiläumfond of the Austrian National Bank to develop this into a Macroeconomic Model for the G7 (with colleagues at Klagenfurt University, Austria). Completed in 2004, these projects resulted in papers in: Economic and Social Review, Computational Economics, Economic Modelling, Research in International Business and Finance, Ekonomia, and the Economics of Transition. Richter was also awarded a Leverhulme grant (with A. Hughes-Hallett, Vanderbilt) which includes part-funding of a PhD student at Loughborough (the balance provided by the Department). This was completed in 2006 and resulted in papers in Computational Economics and the International Journal of Finance and Economics.
Relationships with Business, Professional and Other Users of Research
Following his work on the transition economies under the auspices of two EU ACE/Phare grants, Pentecost was invited to present the Dean’s Lecture on Economy and Society at the University of Lodz (Poland). Pentecost also serves as an academic assessor for the Government Economic Service. He is on the advisory board of the Economics Research Outreach Centre in Kiev, whose mission is to create a new generation of economists for Eastern Europe. Set up by the Economics Education Research Consortium and the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the Centre is funded by the World Bank and other international donors. He was an invited panelist at the “Great Debt Debate” (with other experts and MPs) reported on national TV (2/2/2007); and he gave an invited lecture at the Credit Show in London on “The Household Debt Crisis” in May 2007.
MICROECONOMICS AND INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION
Staff active in the microeconomics and industrial organisation area
Dr Huw Edwards, Dr Ben Ferrett, Dr Adrian Gourlay, Dr Hailin Liao, Dr Claudio Piga, Prof Joanna Poyago-Theotoky, Prof Tom Weyman-Jones, Dr Anthony Glass, Dr Christopher Wilson
Research Projects in microeconomics and industrial organisation
Research projects in microeconomics and industrial organisation in the department in recent years have included the following:
- Microeconometrics and stochastic frontier analysis
- Contract and game theory
- Strategic behaviour of firms and organisations
- General equilibrium modelling and strategic interdependence
- Research and development
- Economics of higher education
- Diffusion of new technology
- Labour supply and trade unions
- Productivity and efficiency measurement in public and private sector organisations
- Energy economics
- Regulatory economics
- Competition policy
- Network economics
- Bargaining and transactions costs in household behaviour
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Franchise contracting
- Firm diversification
- Airline economics
- Tourism economics
| Researcher |
Subject Areas |
Principal Supervisor |
|---|---|---|
| Elias Asproudis | Emissions Trading System | Poyago-Theotoky |
| Gareth Lee | Efficiency and Productivity Analysis - English Football Clubs | Simper |
| Young Lee | The Efficiency and Competition Equilibrium of Main Ports in Northeast Asia | Piga |
| Bin Wang | Efficiency and Productivity | Liao |
| Miao Zhang | Productivity and Efficiency Analysis | Weyman-Jones |
| Vasileios Zikos | R & D Mixed Oligopoly & Labour Unions | Poyago-Theotoky |
Overview of Research Activities in microeconomics and industrial organisation 2001-07
In this period, Edwards participated in an EU-funded Framework V Network, on “Economic and Political Re-Integration in an Enlarged Europe” and this led to several papers (including Bulletin of Economic Research) and a book for the Centre for European Policy Studies. In 2007, Gourlay and Poyago-Theotoky were awarded a Joint Information Systems Committee grant to examine economic aspects of alternative scholarly publishing models (with Loughborough’s Department of Information Science and the Victoria University, Melbourne). Piga won the 2002 Younger Scholar Best Paper Prize, awarded by the Industrial Organization Society, for a paper in the Review of Industrial Organization. His work on “Pricing Strategies in the Low-cost Airlines Segment of the European Civil Aviation Market”, funded by the British Academy, has produced papers in the International Journal of Tourism Research and Tourism Economics, and he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2007/08) to develop this work. Piga has edited a special Issue of Rivista di Politica Economica on the liberalization of the European airline markets (December 2007). Poyago-Theotoky received a grant from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris) to study “Vertical and Horizontal Research Links, Cooperation and Innovation” with colleagues from Nantes (France) and St. Andrews; and a grant from ESRC to study “University–Industry Cooperation, Knowledge Transfer and University Funding”. These projects generated papers in: Australian Economic Papers, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, and the International Journal of Industrial Organization. She was awarded a British Academy grant to study Privatisation and Strategic Trade and Technology Policies, which resulted in a paper being accepted for the Southern Economic Journal (2008). A further grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education (ongoing) allowed the formation of a research network with colleagues in Spain and Germany. She was formerly co-editor of the Journal of Agricultural Economics and is currently an associate editor for E-conomics. She also delivered an invited lecture on the Economics of Science at the GREQAM-ANR Summer School (Aix-en-Provence) in 2007.
Relationships with Business, Professional and Other Users of Research
Edwards is a fellow of The Centre for European Policy Studies (Brussels) and has provided advice to the EU on a range of trade-related issues. He was part of an international team advising the European Commission’s DG Trade and the Ukrainian government on deeper integration, the report of which was published by the Centre for European Policy Studies. He has advised the European Commission on a free trade area with Korea. He currently has a 1/4 appointment with the Institute for World Economics (Kiel, Germany) as part of an EU-funded network researching inequality. Gourlay has advised The Building Societies Association on the impact of new technology, following his published work with Pentecost on technology diffusion in financial services.
Productivity and efficiency measurement are areas in which the department’s research has immediate applications. Weyman-Jones is an internationally-acknowledged expert in this field. He is a member of the Royal Society Energy Policy Analysis Network, and participated in drafting the Royal Society submission to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. He was an invited expert at the German Federal Network Agency’s international conference to consider incentive regulation in the German Electricity and Gas Sector, and he has been advisor to the energy regulatory authorities in the Netherlands and Austria. He also gave the keynote plenary presentation at the fourth (2006) North American Productivity Workshop held at the Stern School of Business, New York University. Simper has also worked extensively on efficiency measurement techniques, and he pioneered the application of these to public sector non-profit bodies especially the police force, but also to education. He has been advisor on policing and efficiency to the Home Office, the Treasury, the Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire Police Forces and the Dutch Government.
ECONOMETRICS
Staff active in the econometrics area
Prof Terence Mills, Dr Paul Turner
Research projects in econometrics
Research projects in econometrics in the department in recent years have included the following:
- Time series econometrics
- Business cycle volatility and growth
- Trends and cycles in economics
- Forecasting in economics and finance
- Economic forecasting evaluation
- Testing for unit roots and cointegration
- Test of stock market efficiency
| Researcher | Subject Areas | Principal Supervisor |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaoshan Chen | Testing the convergence of Business cycles of EMU countries (frequency analysis) | Mills |
| Lijun Fan | Testing the Martingale difference hypothesis in Economic and Financial Time Series | Mills |
| Mohammed Sohrab Rafiq | Time Series/Stock Prices | Mills |
Overview of Research Activities in econometrics 2001-07
In this period, Mills and Pentecost were joint holders of an ESRC grant concerned with Business Cycle Volatility and Economic Growth. This led to 11 papers in major journals: Bulletin of Economic Research, Emerging Markets Review, Economic Issues, Economic Journal, Economic Modelling, Empirical Economics, Journal of Applied Statistics, Journal of Time Series Analysis, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Review of World Economics. Mills’ work on climate change has been cited extensively in the press and he has acted as consultant to the World Gold Council. He also gave two keynote lectures at the 5th Noon-to-Noon Meeting on Statistical and Mathematical Applications in Finance, at the University of Vaasa, Finland in December 2005. Mills is Departmental Editor of the Journal of Forecasting, and is a co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Econometrics. Turner is an associate editor of the European Journal of Finance.