Dissertation Supervision
Hello everyone!
If you are interested in my supervision, you can find below details about my research interests, expectations, potential topics, and examples of previous dissertations I have supervised.
- Empirical projects: If you are seeking guidance for an empirical project, you may select me as a potential supervisor, but the allocation will be random. Due to the high volume of supervision requests, I will not normally be able to agree in advance to supervise an empirical project unless it is an exceptional match.
- Theoretical projects: If you are interested in undertaking a theoretical project, please feel free to contact me. We can discuss your research interests and potential dissertation topics. Because relatively few supervisors and students work on theoretical projects, I will consider supervising your project when your proposal aligns well with my expertise.
Research Interests
- Economic growth: long-run growth, productivity, technological change, natural capital, and the trade-offs between economic development and sustainability.
- Real business cycles and DSGE modelling: the propagation of macroeconomic shocks, investment and labour-market dynamics, heterogeneous firms, and the development, simulation, and Bayesian estimation of structural models.
- Macroeconomic policies: monetary policy, fiscal policy, and macroprudential policy, including their interactions and their effects on inflation, output, investment, welfare, and financial stability.
- Macro-finance, asset prices, and financial crises: the macroeconomic impact of banking and financial intermediation, asset price bubbles, stock and housing markets, financing constraints, and systemic financial risk.
- The impact of climate change on the macroeconomy: climate-related financial risks, emissions and natural capital, sustainable growth, carbon taxation, and the role of monetary and financial policies in the green transition.
My research is primarily theoretical, although I have recently begun working on empirical projects, particularly the Bayesian estimation of DSGE models. My experience with other empirical methods is therefore less extensive than that of supervisors whose research is predominantly empirical.
I am open to supervising both empirical and theoretical projects. However, theoretical projects can be demanding. If you are an undergraduate or MSc student without a strong theoretical background, I generally recommend pursuing an empirical project. It may nevertheless be possible to develop a relatively simple theoretical model; if you have a promising idea, please contact me so that we can discuss its feasibility.
If you have a solid theoretical background—for example, knowledge of real business cycle or New Keynesian models—you could consider developing and, where feasible, estimating a model. Suitable projects might involve relatively simple financial-intermediation structures or models incorporating monetary or fiscal policy.
What I Expect of You
Completing a dissertation is a significant part of your education, and I expect you to devote the necessary effort to it. A carefully researched, well-executed dissertation will be rewarded accordingly; insufficient preparation and engagement will also be reflected in the final result. I want to make this expectation clear from the outset.
If you remain interested in my supervision or need further information, please contact me so that we can discuss your ideas.
Potential Research Topics
DSGE Modelling and Estimation
There are many interesting extensions that can be introduced into a standard real business cycle model. A macro-finance project could incorporate banks to examine financial intermediation, introduce borrowing constraints to study productivity and production, or add a stock market to analyse firms' financing and dividend decisions. Labour-market projects could introduce search frictions or wage rigidities, while heterogeneous firms or entrepreneurs could be used to study aggregate production over the business cycle. These are starting points rather than restrictions: a focused and feasible original extension is strongly encouraged.
Asset Price Bubbles
Asset price bubbles are an important but challenging area of research, both empirically and theoretically. The available empirical methods are relatively specialised, but they can support strong research projects. Theoretical work is more demanding because a model must satisfy strict equilibrium conditions while generating bubble dynamics. Unless you have a clear and feasible strategy for incorporating a bubble into a DSGE framework, I generally recommend an empirical project in this area.
Macroeconomic Experiments
A macroeconomic model or mechanism may sometimes be simplified into a classroom experiment—for example, to study how people form inflation expectations. Subject to logistics, implementation constraints, and ethical approval, an experiment could potentially be conducted during an EC201 lecture or through its Moodle page. Although I have not previously supervised or conducted this type of research, I would be interested in discussing a well-developed proposal. Such a project could be highly valuable, but it would also carry substantial design, feasibility, and ethical-approval risks.
Examples of Projects I Have Supervised
Theoretical and Applied Theoretical Analyses
These projects develop, extend, calibrate, or estimate economic models to examine a clearly defined research question. Applied theoretical work combines formal modelling with data, counterfactual exercises, or quantitative policy analysis.
How NOT to Conduct Monetary Policy: The Case of Turkiye
This work quantifies the welfare cost of an unorthodox monetary policy conducted in Turkiye during 2021–2023 through a counterfactual experiment based on an estimated Markov-switching DSGE model. This episode marks a sharp departure from conventional, inflation-stabilising policy and provides an ideal setting for evaluating welfare losses caused by politically driven departures from orthodoxy.
The analysis uses quarterly data from 2006Q1 to 2025Q1 and specifies four candidate models, three of which allow for regime switching in Taylor-rule parameters and shock volatilities. Estimation results indicate that the best-fitting model includes switching in the inflation-response and interest-rate-smoothing parameters, alongside volatility switching in cost-push shocks. Using this model, the counterfactual experiment estimates welfare gains of 155–177% had the central bank refrained from unorthodox policy during this episode.
Is Net-zero a Feasible Approach? A Theoretical Model of Sustainable Growth and Natural Capital
This paper asks whether net zero is feasible and whether it creates a growth trade-off. It uses an endogenous growth model to examine whether an economy can achieve sustainable green growth by reallocating resources between carbon-intensive artificial capital and biofuel-intensive natural capital.
Production uses two reproducible inputs, natural and artificial capital. The accumulation of artificial capital reduces the natural-capital stock through the negative externality of carbon emissions, which private agents do not internalise. A carbon tax-and-subsidy scheme encourages firms to substitute towards natural capital. Pollution damage can be mitigated or partially reversed, supporting the net-zero objective, but at the cost of lower long-run growth. Improvements in abatement technology may help overcome this trade-off.
Technologies and Labour: A Theoretical Model of Task-based Production in a Labour Market with Search Frictions
This paper examines the relationship between automation, task creation, and labour-market outcomes by incorporating the task-based approach of Acemoglu and Restrepo into a search-and-matching model. The methodology combines theoretical modelling with empirical analysis.
The results indicate that automation has a complex and dual effect on the labour market, depending on the balance between displacement and productivity effects. Task creation is uniformly beneficial, mitigating the adverse effects of automation and supporting labour-market performance. The findings suggest that policies promoting innovation and task creation can help economies benefit from technological change.
Examining the Interactions of Retail and Institutional Investors in a Theoretical Steady-State Model
With the rise of zero-commission trading, retail investors now account for a much larger share of stock-market activity. Their demographic profile has also changed, with younger investors holding smaller portfolios and often displaying a greater willingness to take risks.
This paper develops a theoretical model to investigate the interactions and optimal investment decisions of retail and institutional investors. It finds that retail investors tend to adopt riskier investment strategies, while institutional investors prefer diversified portfolios. The results are consistent with the broader literature on retail-investor preferences and trading behaviour.
Financial Crisis, Quantitative Easing and Income Inequality: A Theoretical Analysis
This paper develops a two-agent New Keynesian model with financial intermediaries to study the distributional effects of financial crises and quantitative easing. The model includes unrestricted households with full access to financial markets and ownership of financial intermediaries and firms, alongside restricted households that cannot borrow or lend and behave in a hand-to-mouth manner.
An asset-value shock is used to examine the effects of large-scale government intermediation during a recession. Access to finance determines how households are affected: richer households become richer while poorer households become poorer. Although both groups benefit from intervention, quantitative easing disproportionately favours wealthier households and widens income inequality.
Climate Change and Monetary Policy: Assessing the Effect of a Climate Lending Facility
Central banks have become increasingly important contributors to climate policy because of their responsibility for macroeconomic and financial stability. However, relatively little theoretical work studies the economic effects of specific climate-oriented central-bank instruments.
This project develops a New Keynesian model to assess a climate lending facility: the provision of low-cost central-bank funding to financial institutions that extend climate-related loans at lower interest rates. It provides a theoretical foundation for evaluating how such a facility influences the dynamic response of the economy.
Financial Shocks with Bank Intermediation
This project extends the RBC model of debt and equity financing developed by Jermann and Quadrini by introducing banks and retirement shocks that affect the probability of bank failure. It studies how bank intermediation changes the propagation of financial shocks using impulse-response functions.
The additional frictions created by banks amplify both the expansionary effects of positive financial shocks and the contractionary effects of negative shocks. Financial and retirement shocks both affect firms' borrowing capacity, but through different channels. The model provides a framework for understanding how financial crises can develop into broader economic crises.
“Killing Two Birds with One Stone”: An Optimal Carbon Tax on Income for the UK
This dissertation examines how an optimal income-based carbon tax affects income inequality and consumption-based carbon emissions in the United Kingdom. It constructs an environmental DSGE model with heterogeneous households and uses a broad social-welfare-maximisation problem to identify the optimal tax rate.
The findings indicate a positive relationship between the optimal tax and society's perceived harm from carbon pollution. Introducing the tax reduces consumption emissions, income inequality, and carbon-related production damage.
Empirical Analyses
These projects use economic and financial data to test hypotheses, identify relationships, or detect changes in market behaviour. They illustrate the use of econometric methods to address substantive questions in macroeconomics and finance.
Quantitative Easing and the Possibility of Stock Market and House Price Bubbles: Evidence from the UK
This paper investigates whether quantitative easing contributes to bubble formation in UK stock and housing markets. The Generalised Supremum Augmented Dickey-Fuller test is used to identify bubbles, after which limited dependent-variable models control for the underlying dynamics during identified periods of exuberance.
Both stock and housing markets exhibit signs of bubbles, but only the housing market shows significant evidence of recent exuberance. The results also support a relationship between quantitative easing and bubble formation.
The Heterogeneous Impact of Financial Literacy and Income on Household Investment Behaviour under Monetary Policy
This paper uses Survey of Consumer Finances data to study how financial literacy and income shape household investment responses to monetary policy. It analyses both participation in risky-asset markets and the share of portfolios allocated to risky assets across years.
Individuals with the lowest financial literacy and income are the least responsive to monetary-policy changes. Within this group, households with a high share of wealth in risky assets may be particularly vulnerable during market downturns. The paper highlights the potential for monetary policy to worsen wealth inequality and emphasises the importance of improving financial literacy alongside monetary interventions.
Liquidity Risk and Its Macro-financial Vulnerabilities in the UK Banking Sector
This research examines the macro-financial vulnerabilities associated with liquidity risk in the UK banking sector from 2007 to 2021. It analyses HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, and NatWest, linking liquidity conditions to bank behaviour and economic performance.
The findings indicate that the banks collectively improved performance at the cost of greater liquidity vulnerability, although their individual relationships with liquidity and economic conditions differ. The project helps explain why liquidity ratios vary across banks despite the introduction of active prudential regulation.
An Analysis of Bitcoin's Explosive Price Behaviour as an Asset Price Bubble in 2020–21
This paper investigates whether Bitcoin experienced an asset-price bubble during 2020 and 2021. It applies the Generalised Supremum Augmented Dickey-Fuller procedure proposed by Phillips, Shi, and Yu to date-stamp periods of explosive price behaviour.
The identified exuberant periods are then linked to events that may have contributed to bubble formation. The paper finds evidence that Bitcoin entered several bubble episodes over the two-year period.
Bubble, Bubble, Where Are You? An Empirical Investigation of House Price Bubbles in Regional Norway
This paper investigates whether regional Norwegian housing markets experienced bubble regimes over the previous two decades. The Generalised Supremum Augmented Dickey-Fuller test identifies explosive behaviour, and the BSADF date-stamping strategy proposed by Phillips and co-authors identifies the corresponding periods.
The paper establishes the presence of several periods of explosivity in selected cities. Oslo, in particular, exhibits multiple boom-and-bust episodes over the sample period.
Detection of Structural Regimes and Analysis of the Impact of Crude Oil on Airline Stock Performance: A Markov Regime-switching Approach
This paper identifies structural regimes in crude-oil prices and estimates their regime-dependent effects on airline stock indices. It applies a Markov-switching vector autoregressive model to weekly oil-price data and a custom index of IATA-associated airline stocks from 1993 to 2023.
The results identify high- and low-volatility oil-price regimes. Oil prices have a positive effect on airline stock performance in the high-volatility regime and a negative effect in the low-volatility regime. The high-volatility regime is also more persistent.