Research interests

The subject of my work has changed a good deal over the past ten years or so, although the methods employed have had common threads: analytic narrative (in the Avner Greif tradition), quantitative history, and institutional economics.

My M.Sc. thesis examined British post-war merger control, and the 1960s merger wave. I was particularly interested in the politics of competition policy: how decision-makers could overcome vocal current interests threatened by competition when those who would benefit - consumers, future producers and future employees - were less organised and less visible. Asymmetric perception of gains and losses is a well-known cognitive bias at the individual level, while asymmetries in interest group formation and representation also deter beneficial change. Governments recurrently struggle with these problems even when they wish to engineer such change. But in many cases their electoral interests are to maintain the status quo. This is why policy history is so interesting.

My D.Phil. thesis examined the rise of opera in Britain from the late-Victorian period until 1970. Alongside an assessment of the regulation and funding of major opera companies, I looked at cross-national data on composers and composed works. This was to assess why Britain was comparatively ohne musik in the 1700s and 1800s, but appeared to catch up during the twentieth century.

I also worked as a research assistant for Avner Offer, who was completing a major work on economic growth and well-being, the Challenge of Affluence (OUP, 2006). As part of this I audited the M.Phil. course on well-being, and was fortunate to become familiar with the field before the 'happiness agenda' took off in policy circles.

I then worked on the economics of land use regulation, and retail policy, for the second Barker Review. At that time I also attended the Whitehall Well-being Working Group. I subsequently relocated to Manchester and continued research in urban policy, and in innovation and the retail sector, for the Work Foundation.

I began a post in Manchester in 2008 on the quantitative study of religion in society - an extremely stimulating field which overlaps the study of social capital, immigration and demography. The economics of religion is an adjacent field which in turn has much in common with cultural economics. There has been much to learn - it's very rewarding.

I have also sought to build skills in quantitative methods from those provided by the M.Sc. While at HMT I took a course in econometrics via STATA hosted at City University. Since I began this post, I've followed up with courses here and at Lancaster on Spatial Regression Analysis, Data Reduction and Classification, Demographic Concepts and Methods, Multi-level Modelling, Event History Analysis, Social Network Analysis, and the R programming language.

Work-related projects are focused on quantitative analysis of religiosity and socio-political attitudes, the drivers of New Religious Movements, and intergenerational transmission of religiosity in historical perspective.

I'm also currently completing papers on:

the politics of land use regulation
the finance and regulation of religious organisations in Germany and Britain
determinants of subjective well-being and self-reported health as joint outcomes.