My research centres around experimental economics, behavioural and environmental and I often work on issues connected to development policy.
Three thumbnails of ongoing projects are given below.
More comprehensive details on grants, publications and collaborators are available from the links below.
Behavioural economics has transformed our picture of individual decision-making. Is the household also behavioural?
Behavioural households
Mean cooperation between spouses is significantly less than 100% in most intra-household experiments.
Ageing Japan and the Environment
Japan is at the forefront of ageing in the industrialized economics. Its population is dropping by several hundred thousand
people each year.
Broadly speaking, a declining populations makes it easier to attain carbon emission targets.
What are the other implications of Japan's ageing population for its environmental policy?
Lab-in-the-field
Epistemologically, the central idea is that a more useful understanding of the beliefs and
preferences elements of individuals and groups can be obtained by conducting controlled interventions
with non-students away from the typical campus laboratory.
Learned helplessness
Working with a sample of smallholder farmers from rural Uganda and using established ideas on contingency from social psychology, we
investigate experimentally whether performance in an unrelated task has spillover effects for effort in a new task.
Teaching
Advanced Microeconomics III - Behavioural and Experimental. (PhD)
Environmental Economics (Masters)
Mathematics for Economic Analysis (Masters)
Previous Teaching
Public Economics (pg/ug)
Game theory (pg/ug)
Microeconomic theory (pg/ug)
Phd Students
I have ex-students at the IMF, ADBI, working as university professors or researchers in
Europe, Singapore,
Asia and Africa and serving as civil servants in their home countries.
Past
Current students are doing projects on air quality in Ethiopia,
the circular economy in Japan and household decision-making over debt in Thailand.
Present
I particularly welcome students with an interest in applying experimental and behavioural economics to environmental issues.
Almost all my students engage in primary data collection of some sort, a skill I see as essential for the social science researcher.
Future
You should have your own ideas and I expect you to complete successfully our Advanced core in Macroeconomics,
Microeconomics and Econometrics before we partner.
About Me
Now based at GRIPS, a national university in the heart of Tokyo, where I am a Professor of Economics and Executive Advisor to the President. I was Director of the Policy Analysis PhD Programme,
an English language doctoral programme in modern, quantitative Economics.
I am also co-editor of Environmental and Resource Economics.
At GRIPS
I'm a native of Coventry, UK, home of Ghost Town , the real
Godiva and the British motor industry, as well as the disputed birthplace of the modern bicycle.
Bio
I was previously a Professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London and before that
inaugural head of the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia.