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Fantastic news to share with you today 🎉 Natasha Brooks has been awarded a PhD in Economics. Congratulations Dr. Brooks, we’re so pleased for you. 🥳🕺#economics #yourfuture #uoe #economicsatessex #phd

Our Postgraduate Open evening is on Weds 19 March at our Colchester campus, join us for an evening of talks and tours, find out about our alumni discount and get answers to your questions about PG study at Essex. Book: essex.ac.uk/events/2025/03…

👀Find out how former students voices led to positive changes. There is still time to complete either the NSS or YES surveys and effect change by having your say 🙌 👉NSS: Use the QR code, or go to thestudentsurvey.com 👉 YES: Use the QR code, or go to essex.ac.uk/student/voice/…

Brilliant news. Congratulations Eleni 👏👏👏

New CEPR Discussion Paper - DP20052 A Man’s World? Consumption-Based Investment in the Mutual Fund Industry Hans Peter Grüner Hans Peter Grüner Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, Christoph Siemroth Uni Essex Economics Dept ow.ly/pnS650Vj2uU #CEPR_BCF #EconTwitter

🎓Huge congratulations to Dr Hamid Nejadghorban on completing their PhD & officially becoming a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics! Your dedication, perseverance, & passion for research have truly paid off. We're incredibly proud to celebrate this milestone with you 👏 #PhDlife

Thinking about doing a placement year? Hear it straight from someone who's been there! 👏 Check out our spotlight video by alumni Francis Nwofor. 👀 Watch now vimeo.com/1074322898?sha…

"The European migration crisis of 2015–2016 exposed weaknesses in the asylum system that have been only partly addressed," says Tim Hatton Uni Essex Economics Dept in his article: European asylum policy before and after the migration crisis. wol.iza.org/articles/europ…

Feeling very sad today as we say goodbye to Lorna😭 Lorna has been an amazing Research Student Administrator & a fundamental part of our team for 17 yrs and she will be missed.👏👏 Please join us in saying thank you to Lorna & in wishing her every happiness in her retirement❤️

📢New WP on networks in innovation Collaborating innovators form a network. Does the network position matter for outcomes? Is it helpful to have well-connected collaborators? Empirical answers based on over 28k corporate innovators. A summary 🧵👇 🔗papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Setting: Employees in a firm can formulate and suggest innovative ideas (eg cost cutting measures, process improvements, product improvements). It's a bit like the review process in academia: ideas get evaluated, may need to be revised, get accepted or rejected. See graph: 2/n

Data: All ideas are tracked in intranet Idea Portal. We observe 1⃣ accept/reject decision for every idea, and 2⃣ whether the client rated the idea highly [clients don't often rate bad ideas, so absence of rating is bad signal]. These are our two innovation quality measures. 3/n

Collaboration: Ideas can be submitted by up to 5 employees together. These are "coauthors". Then there are coauthors of coauthors, and coauthors of those, etc., up to a very high degree. These collaborations form the innovation network. Visualized, the data looks like this: 4/n

Estimation: We look at the networks in discrete 6-month time windows. Then we follow the same employee over time. Using the variation in network position for the same employee over time, we estimate the effects of network position on innovation quality. 5/n

Descriptive result: the mode network is a network of size 1. That is, innovators who don't collaborate. Really large networks are rare. So the innovation process in the firm -- a very large firm -- is divided in smaller local networks. Here's the distribution: 6/n

Regressions. Effect of individual network position: higher degree (more coauthors) is better for innovation quality. An additional coauthor increases acceptance chance by 2.4 percentage points on average, ditto for chance of good client rating. Network size no significant effect.

Bridge centrality (BC): How much an employee bridges between clusters of others. In the graph below, black dots have highest BC In the regression, BC has negative effect on innovation quality, holding degree constant. But positive effect if not controlling for degree 8/n

That's because degree and BC are positively correlated: employees with lots of coauthors also tend to bridge more between clusters of different employees. Our explanation: Negative effect of BC holding degree constant indicates that bridging is individually costly. 9/n

At the same time, having someone with high BC in the network is valuable for innovators: Having a top 10% bridger in my network increases my chance of getting idea approval by 3.4 percentage points. So bridging provides a positive externality. Bridgers link people and expertise

More in the paper, just one more thing here. We can compare networks during work from office, work from home, and hybrid Networks shrink during hybrid. People have fewer coauthors. Bridging decreases. Effect of WFH/hybrid on innovation in another paper: nature.com/articles/s4159…