Project title: Nowcasting the UK economy
Prospective lead supervisor: Dr Robert Calvert Jump
This project is an exciting opportunity to undertake funded PhD research while collaborating with Autonomy: an up-and-coming, highly innovative thinktank.
The project will focus on nowcasting the UK economy. For some time, a lack of real-time information has been identified as a significant constraint on policymaking in this country, with many datasets only available with a lag of 3 months or more.
To take one example, the only dataset that the current government could use to allocate local authorities to its High Streets Task Force was the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation. But this dataset relies on deprivation indicators dating from 2017 or earlier. In other words, councils are being allocated to place-based policies in 2022 based on information that is at least 5 years’ out of date.
Meanwhile, the Covid-19 lockdowns in the UK during 2020 and 2021 significantly reduced the capacity of the Office of National Statistics to measure the economy. Labour market measurement via surveys that rely heavily on face-to-face interviews, such as the Labour Force Survey, were particularly badly affected.
Clearly, therefore, there is a need for high quality, real-time information on the UK economy to assist in the formation of economic policy, and this PhD project will fill this gap. Working with both the supervisory team and researchers from Autonomy, the successful candidate will:
• Use labour market information from online sources, gathered using Autonomy’s web scraping expertise, to produce the first study of nowcasting UK sub-regional labour markets
• Use contemporaneous economic and social information from online sources, gathered using Autonomy’s web scraping expertise, to produce the first study of nowcasting UK sub-regional deprivation
The first avenue of inquiry will build on the existing academic literature on nowcasting regional GDP in the UK. The second avenue of inquiry will build on the Annual Deprivation Index, which is an ongoing collaboration between Autonomy and the lead supervisor. Both avenues of inquiry will explore ‘classic’ nowcasting techniques, including mixed data sampling models, factor models, and bridge equations, as well as more recently developed ‘big data’ techniques, including penalised regression and regression trees, boosting, and genetic algorithms.
As well as working in a vibrant, progressive academic environment at the University of Greenwich, the successful candidate will also have the opportunity to work at the Autonomy offices for part of the week. Opportunities to contribute to cutting edge policy work will be part and parcel of this scholarship, as well as attending summer schools and conferences.
The successful candidate will have a background in economics or a cognate discipline, with a strong quantitative focus. They will be comfortable with programming languages such as Python, and statistical analysis in Stata or R. They will be committed to the idea that careful empirical analysis can contribute to making the world a better place.
Closing date for applications: midnight UTC on 14 June (Wednesday) 2023.
The interview for the scholarship is on 16 June (Friday) 2023.
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