Hamish Low
I am the James Meade Professor of Economics and the Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford.
I am also a Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research
My research is across public finance, labour economics and macroeconomics. The underlying focus of my research agenda is on two broad set of issues: first, what sort of risks do individuals face over their life-times. Second, to what extent can individuals insure against these risks, through their private decisions over saving and labour supply, through their families and through government provided welfare and social insurance.
Key themes in my work are the interaction between different decisions and the dynamic implications of those decisions. For example, in my paper "Marriage, labour supply and the dynamics of the social safety net", that analyses the implications of the introduction of time limits, we show the importance of allowing for the interaction between welfare claiming, labour supply and divorce.
This is both a micro and a macro research agenda: to understand what is happening to the aggregate economy, it is necessary to model carefully individual behaviour and the heterogeneity we observe across individuals and families. Similarly, to understand individual behaviour, it is necessary to understand the risks at the aggregate level. Insurance comes through individuals own decisions, such as over how much to work or to save, as well as through social insurance such as unemployment and disability insurance.
Much of my research uses simulations of uncertainty in a life-cycle framework to model these mechanisms in a realistic way, allowing for the differences across individuals that we observe in the data. In taking these models to the data, I use structural estimation to ensure a close tie between the data and the models. The approach behind my work is outlined in my Journal of Economic Perspectives article on The Use of Structural Models in Econometrics.
Recent working papers:
Jakobsen, K., Jorgensen, T and Low, H. (2023) "Fertility and Family Labor Supply" Department of Economics, University of Oxford Working Paper [This paper uses both reduced from and structural methods to show how families labour supply and fertility decisions respond to economic incentives, and highlights the interaction between these decisions, as well as key asymmetries by gender]
Hunt, T. , Low, H and Smith, S. (2022) "Understanding REF funding allocations in 2022" Department of Economics, University of Oxford [This provides an analysis of research funding decisions across disciplines in the UK]
Head of Department:
This video captures the direction of the Economics Department at Oxford. Our aim is to generate transformative research that has impact and inspires.
Non-Academic Talks:
The Oxford Economics Department runs an online series on "What Economists Really Do", aimed at a wide audience. This is my talk on disability insurance: