Experts

Arlene Wong is an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Arlene’s research focuses on macroeconomics, monetary economics, and household consumption.

Max Wood is an editorial assistant at the Economics Observatory’s Bristol hub. In 2021 he completed his Economics degree at the University of Bristol. He is also a content creator and rising star on social media app TikTok.

Jack is lead economist and school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). He is an expert on the teacher labour market, specialising in using large administrative and survey datasets to understand the changing teaching profession and identify ways of improving teacher recruitment, development and retention.

I am an applied economist specialising in quantitative methods. My main research area is the economics of higher education, and I am particularly interested in inequalities in university participation and attainment, and the drivers of it – including higher education finance, information advice and guidance, subject choice, drive and ambition, and school factors such as predicted A-level grades.

Lei Xu is an Economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. His research interests include labour economics, economics of education, and applied micro-econometrics. He has past and ongoing works on the returns to apprenticeship from both the perspective of apprentice and firm, minimum wage, returns to university graduate, housing prices in China. He currently has strong interests on the topics of productivity, digitalization, career development and wage structure.

Xiaowei joined the IFS in 2018 and works in the Income, Work and Welfare sector. Her research focuses on inequalities in labour market outcomes and health. Before joining the IFS, she worked at McKinsey, the Gates Foundation and in economic consulting.