My students: the Real world economics of Happiness, Migration, and Big Recessions.

  Figure 1: Professor Frijters' Students: Nemanja Antic, Tony Beatton, and Redzo Mujcic

  Redzo’s PhD topic is migration and he’s developing theoretical and empirical models of the role of status-seeking motives in migrations. This is the idea that people migrate in order to be richer than the people they compare themselves with rather than in order to get more money per se. The aim is to first understand the basic mechanisms at the theoretical level and then to incorporate relative motives in empirical models of migration flows

Tony’s PhD topic is the question to what degree we can make any reliable inferences in applied economic empirical work. The inherent problem faced in applied work is that everything is connected to everything else and nothing that we measure is what we intended to measure in our models. Tony will try to unearth the empirical importance of these limitations to our knowledge.

Nemanja’s honours’ topic is the question what the most important production factor is that gets destroyed during big economic recessions. The empirical observation he is working on is that the major recessions (such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Collapse of the economies of the former Soviet Union after 1990 and the Asian Crises of the late 1990s) did not involve the destruction of any of the usually mentioned production factors such as land, labour, capital or technology. Yet output definitely collapsed in these recessions meaning there must be another production factor at play which he is trying to identify and model.

Whilst working on different topics, all 3 students work to a very similar plan, which is to firstly get a decent mental picture of the main facets of the problem they look at (a ‘model’), then to have a look at the available data in the light of that mental model, and then to draw some inference as to how important this or that mental construct really is in reality or whether we can't yet say.