Rachel is Research Director of the IFS and Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP). She is Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association and a Research Fellow of CEPR. Rachel won the Birgit Grodal award in 2014, was awarded a CBE in for services to economic policy in 2015 and was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021. Her research considers the relationship between government policy and economic performance. Her specific interests relate to empirical industrial organisation, the retail food sector, nutrition, innovation, productivity and corporate tax.
Education
PhD Economics, Keele University, 1999
MSc Econometrics and Forecasting, City of London Polytechnic, 1991
BA (Magna cum Laude) Economics, University of Massachussets , 1985
We show that observed behaviour can be rationalised by the fact that the shadow price of home-cooked food, which accounts for the fact that cooking takes time, has risen relative to the price of ready-to-eat food.
Firms are at the centre of our economy: they make the things we buy, set prices, invent new things and provide jobs. They also differ widely in their size, their productivity, their innovativeness, and the wages and conditions they offer. This event will address a number of key questions regarding firms and inequality.
Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. We assess who are most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual specific preferences. We relate these preferences and counterfactual predictions to individual characteristics and show that soda taxes are relatively effective at targeting the sugar intake of the young, are less successful at targeting the intake of those with high total dietary sugar, and are unlikely to be strongly regressive especially if consumers benefit from averted internalities.
We document that within-individual variation in food choices is substantial and has potentially important consequences for nutrition, and hence well-being.
The spread of COVID‐19, and international measures to contain it, are having a major impact on economic activity in the UK. In this paper, we describe how this impact has varied across industries, using data on share prices of firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, and how well targeted government support for workers and companies is in light of this.
