Martin Ryan is a Ph.D. student at the UCD School of Economics (University College Dublin, Ireland) and a Ph.D. affiliate at the UCD Geary Institute. He began his Ph.D. in September 2007, and is due to submit his thesis in summer 2011. His Ph.D. research was supported for three years by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), with additional support from a Geary Scholarship. In his Ph.D. research, Martin is investigating the micro-econometrics of student behaviour and outcomes, both during and after higher education.

Prior to starting his Ph.D., Martin worked as a research assistant at the Geary Institute, on projects mostly related to higher education and student well-being. Previous to working at Geary, he joined a project at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) on participation in higher education in Ireland. This project began in June 2005 and was supported by the Irish National Development Plan. He worked on this project for two years, earning a research masters (M.Phil.) from DIT (2007), in which he examined the micro-econometrics of transition from school to higher education.

In his Ph.D. thesis, Martin is examining the role of personality and economic psychology in students’ time use and academic performance. This work involves measurement of students’ attitude to risk, their consideration of future consequences and their personality traits. Survey measures of these traits are a recent innovation in applied microeconomics. Martin is working with data collected through a large-scale web survey that he designed with researchers at the Geary Institute. This survey (the Irish Universities Study) was an official feedback mechanism for students attending Ireland’s seven universities.

Main areas of interest: Education Economics; Behavioural Economics; Labour Economics; Applied Econometrics; Economics of Science, Economics of Innovation