PhD Fraser of Allander Institute

This fully funded PhD project will use a combination of econometric and computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling techniques to look at the impact of high-tech new businesses on employment in local and regional economies.

This project aims at capturing and measuring the impact of new businesses generation on local and regional economies in the UK. Attracting new, particularly high productivity, businesses is a policy priority of the UK government and underpins the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy. One reason for this is that when new businesses are started in local areas, new jobs are created both in the same industry and in other industries, due to the increase in demand for local goods.

This is known as the local employment multiplier effect.

The hope of government is that by attracting new, high productivity, firms to parts of the UK which lack these sorts of jobs, this will create spillover employment effects throughout regional and local economies. However, these positive impacts may be offset by a series of general equilibrium forces that could result, for example, in an overall increase in the cost of living in the area.

This project will combine detailed microeconometric work and multi-sectoral multi-regional CGE modelling to produce a strong evidence base on the magnitude of UK local employment multipliers. The first part of this work will involve the use of firm-level and individual-level microdata to better understand and model key inputs to the assessment of local employment multipliers. The second part of this work will develop and use a multiregional CGE model of the UK to capture induced and general equilibrium effects.

The Final date to receive applications is: 30 April 2020

Supervisors:
Gioele Figus,  and Stuart Mcintyre,

Regional Science Association International