Francesca Arduini

I am an applied microeconomist. Currently, I am a PhD candidate at UCL and PhD Scholar at IFS. I previously studied in Oxford, where I continue teaching. In September 2025, I will start my new role of Economics Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.

Areas of interest: household economics, labour economics, public economics, game theory, competition economics.

I am interested in understanding individual, household, and firm decision-making, to the end of informing evidence-based decision-making by institutions including governments, courts and employers. Much of my work is motivated by the goal of uncovering and narrowing inequalities, especially gender inequalities. In order to disentangle mechanisms, and evaluate potential policy responses, it is often valuable to combine a structural approach with empirical analysis. To this end, I draw on microeconomic theory, mostly bargaining and game theory, in my work.

For example, in my paper Estimating Intra-Household Sharing From Time-Use Data, I propose a new approach to estimating intra-household sharing, which is grounded in a general household bargaining model, but is also simple to implement by linear regression, with widely available data. I find that, for UK working couples, women are 20% more likely than men to be in poverty, and discuss policy options to narrow that gap.

In a co-authored follow-up paper, The Impact of Female Empowerment on Household Emissions, we find that households where women have more bargaining power also have a lower propensity to emit greenhouse gases, providing an additional rationale to tackle intra-household inequalities .

Those papers are grounded in the widely used static collective model of the household, which assumes efficient decision-making. Instead, in my ongoing Parental Leave in the UK project, I aim to understand workplace and household choices relating to parental leave. These are importantly dynamic, and may be characterised by substantial inefficiencies. In this context, I draw on non-cooperative game theory to explore: (i) on the employer side, choices to offer above-statutory parental leave duration and pay, and about which types of workers to hire and promote; and (ii) on the household side, decisions on marriage, fertility, career investments and the allocation of time-use between childcare and work. I ask how government policy affects these decisions, and how it relates to outcomes including gender pay gaps.

Methodologically, this work has substantial overlaps with my background in competition economics. I have 7 years of experience (3 full-time) drawing on game theory to advise on antitrust cases. For example, in Focal Pricing and Pass-Through, I debunk a common misconception that focal pricing practices (e.g. prices ending in 9s) lead to little or no pass-through of inflated input costs. This misconception has been raised in several high-profile cases, and was a key factor in the Lithium Ion Batteries class action being dismissed by the Court. However, this notion is not grounded in economic theory (nor empirical evidence). In my paper I demonstrate that, under industrial organisation models commonly used in competition cases, the adoption of focal pricing has no impact on the expected pass-through rate.

My competition work involves assessing the incentives of firms, sometimes in their capacity as employers. This closely relates to the incentives I address in my parental leave project, in particular competitive pressures for employers to offer above-statutory leave duration and pay. For my parental leave project, I draw on similar economic models and apply them to household, as well as firm, decision-making.

My pipeline for future work includes extensions of my current work, for example a project systematically evaluating the predictive success of different approaches to estimating intra-household inequality. I am also excited to start working on new questions, under my overarching aim of informing institutional decision-making. This includes a project on the relationship between hormonal contraceptives, short-term educational attainment, and long-term career outcomes for young women. As well as an overall effect, this paper will aim to uncover heterogeneity and disentangle mechanisms (including impacts on dysmenorrhea, mental health, unplanned pregnancies, school attendance and choices of subjects to study). This project has the potential to contribute to evidence-based updating of medical guidelines on prescribing hormonal contraceptives.

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