Causal Modelling for Macroeconometrics.

I have an interest in working at the intersection of applied microeconometrics and microeconometric theory. From the applied perspective, I am particularly interested in understanding individual behaviour and outcomes within labour markets and education. I have already been introduced to the empirical research in these fields through research assistant positions at UCL and at Aalto University in Finland.
The use of structural discrete choice models together with microdata is a specific topic I would hope to work on. I believe there are several faculty members at the Economics Department at Oxford whose research interests would complement my own. In my third-year independent research essay, one of my key interests has been to explore how surveyed expectations can be used in structural models to analyse the choices individuals make on their education. Dr. Teodora Boneva has done some very inspiring work related to this, and I am particularly excited to see that she has focused on topics in higher education, something which closely relates to my own ongoing research (see section 5). During my postgraduate studies, I would hope to use similar methods to study what kind of preferences underlie decisions on occupation, retirement and human capital investments.
On the more methodological side, I am interested in how individual heterogeneity can be incorporated into this kind of preference analysis, and how simulation methods used to estimate dynamic choice models. I would also hope to develop new kinds of flexible estimation methods that could be used to relax the parametric assumptions used in many past studies. I believe Prof. Hamish Low's experience on related topics would be invaluable for such work. Research using structural models can make large contributions beyond academic circles. From a policy perspective, structural methods are particularly useful for analysing the potential impact of new policies, such as changes in social security benefits and taxes. This is achieved by using economic theory as a guide to explicitly specify the mechanisms through which such policies affect behaviour. The usefulness of structural models in policy evaluation can be amplified if the researcher has access to data containing experimentally assigned treatments. The large research group in Development Economics at Oxford could thus be a big support for my interests, given the wide use of field experiments in research on developing countries.