Dr Angus Holford Senior Research Fellow, University of Essex
- ajholf@essex.ac.uk
- Office
- 2N2.5B.07
I’m an economist based in the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.
I have recently published on the impacts of international students at UK universities on British students’ labour market outcomes (read the blog for UK in a Changing Europe here) and the impacts of free school lunches on children’s obesity prevalence (media coverage here).
Research Agenda: My research agenda is focused on the mechanisms in determining gender, socio-economic and ethnic differences in educational attainment and early labour market outcomes. At present, this means one strand of work focusing on the impacts of Universal Free School Meal programmes, and another on access and returns to Higher Education, including analysing a ground-breaking longitudinal study of student life.
I serve on the UK Government’s ‘Evaluation and Trials Advice Panel‘, to support the design and implementation of robust, high-quality evaluations of new government policies. I’m also a Research Affiliate with the IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor) and was a Research Fellow at the Behavioural Insights Team (‘Nudge Unit’) at the Cabinet Office, Oct 2012-Jan 2013, where I produced verbal and written policy advice and research reports, and was involved in randomised control trials for evidence-based policy.
Research Interests: Evidence-based policy; randomised control trials; peer effects; microeconometrics; family economics; education inequalities.
Teaching: I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in recognition of my practice in teaching and learning support. I deliver the course Introduction to Impact Evaluation annually through the National Centre for Research Methods. I am the course convenor and lead lecturer on the MSc module “EC969: Applications of Data Analysis” run jointly with the Department of Economics. This is a compulsory module for the MSc Applied Economics and Data Analysis and optional for MSc Economics.
Supervision: I am co-supervisor for three PhD students, Stephanie Ruscillo, Dipanwita Ghatak, and Ziyi Huang</a>; and co-supervised Tomasso Sartori , Sonkurt Sen and Joshua Fullard to completion. I’m available to discuss proposals for potential PhD supervision.
Latest Blog Posts
- Attracting entrepreneurial scientists – should the UK be more like the US?
- Peer pressures
- The unexplored impacts of international students