Experts

Sonya joined the IFS in February 2014 as Director of the Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies (EDePo). Her main research interests are in the determinants of skill acquisition among children and young people living in poverty, as well as more broadly the mechanisms through which childhood conditions manifest in child development and outcomes. Her recent work focuses on the role of home and school factors in explaining the evolution of gaps in cognitive skills and school attainment

Ashwin is an economist and is Professor of Social Policy in the Policy Evaluation Research Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is also the Unit’s Deputy Director.
Ashwin works on analysis and modelling of incomes, poverty, the labour market and welfare reform. He is also a member of the UK Statistics Authority Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices (Stakeholder), and a member of the Audit Committee of the homelessness charity St Mungo’s

Hande Küçük is the Deputy Director for Macroeconomics, Modelling and Forecasting at NIESR. She holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics and previously worked as Deputy Director at the Central Bank of Turkey in the Research and Monetary Policy Department. She is experienced in central banking, macroeconomic modelling, forecasting and policy analysis. Her research areas are international macroeconomics and finance, monetary economics, applied econometrics.

Margaret Kyle (MINES ParisTech and CEPR) currently holds the Chair in Intellectual Property and Markets for Technology at MINES ParisTech. Her research concerns innovation, productivity and competition. She has a number of papers examining R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical industry, specifically the role of geographic and academic spillovers; the firm-specific and policy determinants of the diffusion of new products; generic competition; and the use of markets for technology. Recent work

Jennifer L. Castle is an Official Fellow in Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, an Associate Member of Climate Econometrics, Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. She previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford. Her research interests lie in the fields of model selection and forecasting, in which she has published widely.

François Lafond is a senior research officer at the Mathematical Institute and deputy director of the Complexity Economics group at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, and an associate member of Nuffield college. His main areas of research are in the economics of innovation and productivity, environmental economics, networks and complex systems, applied econometrics and forecasting.