Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Southampton
I am an applied microeconomist. My research explores the motives behind prosocial behaviour in contexts such as charitable giving, climate change, and political economy. I enjoy working with unstructured, non-traditional data.
I did my PhD at the University of Bristol and worked briefly at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center as a postdoc.
Do people care more about the environment after climate disasters? I find that those directly affected by flooding do, but most do not change their actions when their neighbours are hit—except for those with strong moral universalist values.
When a big charity is hit by scandal, do people give elsewhere or stop donating altogether? Donors do not give up on giving; instead, they shift support to other similar charities, identified by the words charities use in their missions.
Does a universal crisis make people more locally focused? We show that donors shifted their giving towards local charities after Covid, more so in harder-hit and cohesive communities. Those more affected also became less responsive to overseas disaster appeals, and places with larger rises in parochialism saw quicker rebounds in wellbeing.