Category: Blog

  • Keynote on Shared Perspectives “Political Economy of Climate (In)Action”

    Below is the powerpoint of a keynote I gave (but interrupted after 1h due to feeling unwell) at the Shared Perspectives event at University of Bologna, October 6, 2023. Political-Economy-of-Climate-InactionDownload

  • Solutions to Climate Crisis

    The invasion of Ukraine is now in its second year. The war has raised a ton of issues and has made transparent many of the institutional failings that are due to relatively slow and modest technology adoption. The shocks have just been hitting incredibly hard and very frequent. The pandemic highlighted the many structural deficiencies…

  • Horizon Scandal, IT systems and the honors system

    This is another meta reflection that I want to share. This is relating the the Horizon IT system or the Post Office scandal. I must admit I have not followed all the details here but what strikes me as surprising is the timing that this scandal is being brought to light. Well, not quite brought…

  • Narrative Reset

    One meta reflection on the Piketty, Saez, Zucman and Auten & Splinter debate is the following. It suggests there is an attempt to reset, control or cast doubt on a narrative. On one side you have academics at a top US University, on the other hand, you have academic economists associated with the public sector.…

  • Nudgocratic rule

    Information governance and barriers to the free flow of information and data has been a or the key barrier to climate action. But with the rise of the information and attention economy, politically slanted information has both become the prime source of rents, while at the same time, has morphed into a potential weapon that…

  • Why councils across UK are going bust?

    This short blog post explains why local councils across the UK are going bust.

  • Electoral surprises and business cycles

    Surprise election outcomes can lead to unexpected changes in the incumbent government and the policy agenda. This column studies the economic impact of electoral surprises using a new dataset election polls and outcomes covering 233 elections across 51 countries. It finds that, in strong democracies, electoral surprises (defined as deviations between polling predications and election…

  • On the role of private data in research

    Note: this is a reposted version of a verbal intervention at the Economic Policy Panel meeting in 2021 discussing some institutional considerations in light of research work that was presented that leverages private data for research. The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented economic policy response across much of the world. A broad range of…

  • Media’s Role in Economic Shocks: Unveiling the ‘Media Multiplier’

    Negative events, from crime to pandemics, often trigger responses influenced or amplified by media coverage. Our collaborative work sheds light on this. Delve into the empirical concept—the ‘media multiplier’—where media magnifies the economic impact of adverse shocks. A Fresh Approach: Dyadic News DataTraditional media multiplier assessment focused on news timing. Our new paper innovates by…

  • What I learned from doing research during the pandemic

    Public inquiries into COVID-19 policy making can tell us a lot about how robust our society’s plumbing is and whether evidence-based policy making is a lived practice – let’s not waste that opportunity

  • Contribution to the workshop “Beyond Neoliberalism and Neo-illiberalism: Economic Policies and Performance for Sustainable Democracy” at the New School

    Let me tell you a little bit about my adult life as experienced through crises. In 2008, I moved to the UK, and the first crisis hit and was very apparent. The global financial crisis affected mounts of demography and my own economic outlook. It also resulted in an excessively large PhD cohort at the…