Curriculum Vitae
I was born (in October 1976*) and brought up in Nottingham. My university education took me to St. John's College in Oxford where I read PPE (MA (1st), 1998) and then Economics (MPhil, 2000). Upon leaving university I moved to London to work for the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). During my (almost) nine years at the IFS I also completed my PhD (April 2009) by studying part-time at University College London under the supervision of Prof Richard Blundell and Prof Orazio Attanasio. In December 2008 I became lecturer in economics and the University of Bologna, and my physical transfer to Italy was finalised in summer 2009. In December 2010 I became associate professor in Bologna.
Throughout my career my research has focussed on the topics of: individuals' consumption and savings decisions, and how these choices are affected by the structure of state and private pensions; and, of individuals' home-ownership decisions and the relationship between house price shocks and aggregate consumption growth. These two lines of research were drawn together in my PhD thesis entitled “Consumption and Saving Decisions in the face of Choices about Housing and Pensions”. I have also published some work on the process of formation of, and distributional effects of, tax and benefit policy in the U.K.
Particularly with the link to IFS, my work has contributed directly to both academic and policy debate. My more academic outputs have been published in journals such as the Review of Economic Dynamics, the Journal of the European Economic Association, Economica, the Journal of Health Economics and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
Here is a pdf of my CV (including a list of publications)
* In fact, the day I was born was the day that John Lennon celebrated his 36th birthday and Sean Lennon celebrated his first. I was also born under the ABBA star as Dancing Queen was number 1 in the U.K. pop charts.