Matthew Sharp - AI Economics and Policy

SELECTED THINGS I'M WORKING ON

Agentic inequality (with Omer Bilgin, Oxford, Iason Gabriel, DeepMind, and Lewis Hammond, Cooperative AI Foundation). How agentic AI systems risk concentrating economic and political power, and the governance responses available. Accepted at Nature Machine Intelligence.
Unlocking AI usage data for labour market research (with co-authors at the University of Oxford, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and the Centre for the Governance of AI). How aggregated usage data from frontier labs can track adoption at task and population scale, and how access governance should be designed across developers, governments, and statistical agencies.
Quantitative empirical work on AI adoption and digital payments. Applied statistical methods to estimate economic effects - from country-level studies of AI adoption and productivity through to impact evaluations of digital payments using granular transactions data. (e.g. a G20/BIS working paper)
Frontier AI governance in emerging economies. How developing countries should approach the governance of frontier AI, given different state capacities and exposures to its economic effects. Recently presented at the ITU's TDAG meeting in Geneva.
Building automation workflows and delivering LLM training for tech policy consulting. I have been building end-to-end workflows: tailored policy monitoring, templated slide production, proposal development, etc. I also have designed and delivered many hours of training for all the consulting staff in my company.

RECENT PRESS

'Your interview questions assume candidates can afford Claude Code Max' - Lead Dev

I'm an applied economist working on AI governance, with a focus on how advanced AI systems are reshaping labour markets, inequality, and human agency. I lead AI advisory engagements as an Associate Director at Access Partnership and am a Research Affiliate at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative. My work combines applied research with advisory engagements for governments, technology firms, and multilateral organisations across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. I'm also a Senior Economics Advisor at the Windfall Trust - an NGO focused on the distributional impacts of AI. I'm based in London.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE

AI governance research

Winter Fellow, Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI).
Future Impact Group fellowships, co-authoring with collaborators at DeepMind, the Cooperative AI Foundation, and the University of Oxford.

Policy and economic advisory

McKinsey & Company - strategy and policy advisory on technology, digital transformation, sustainability, and public policy economics.
The World Bank - economic analysis and infrastructure policy design in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and South Africa.

Academic and applied economics

Senior Postdoctoral Associate, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

EDUCATION

PhD focused on applied/labour economics from the London School of Economics & Political Science
MRes in public policy economics from the Paris School of Economics
MSc in urban planning and development economics from Darmstadt University of Technology
BSocSci in economics, politics, philosophy, and anthropology from the University of Cape Town

My postgraduate degrees were fully funded through scholarships from the UK government, the French government, and the European Commission.