Teaching

My teaching is guided by a simple principle: economics and econometrics matter most when they help students make sense of important real-world problems. Across my modules, I aim to move students beyond learning techniques in isolation and towards understanding how theory, evidence, and judgement come together in good applied work. Whether I am teaching undergraduate econometrics, advanced causal inference, research practice, or sustainability and climate change, my goal is to help students become careful, critical, and confident users of evidence.

A consistent feature of my teaching is that I build from intuition to method to application. I want students to understand not only how a technique works, but why it is needed, what assumptions it relies on, and where it can go wrong. In econometrics, this means starting from substantive questions and simple empirical settings before moving to more advanced topics such as omitted variables, measurement error, heteroskedasticity, panel methods, discrete choice models, and causal inference designs including difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity. My aim is rigorous understanding without losing sight of the question the method is meant to answer.

My teaching is also strongly research-led. Across my modules, students engage with published empirical papers, including frontier research and, where useful, examples from my own work. This allows them to see how economists actually frame questions, justify empirical strategies, test assumptions, and interpret findings. In this way, students encounter economics not as a closed technical system, but as a way of engaging with live social and policy questions.

I place particular emphasis on helping students read and evaluate evidence critically. Students are encouraged to ask where identification comes from, what the relevant counterfactual is, which assumptions are doing the work, and how robust the conclusions really are. This is reflected both in classroom teaching and in assessments that ask students to analyse data, evaluate research designs, and construct evidence-based arguments rather than simply reproduce material mechanically.

More broadly, I try to make the practices of academic and professional work visible. This includes helping students formulate research questions, work with real data, communicate findings clearly, and understand the often uncertain process through which good research develops. My aim is to combine rigour, relevance, and intellectual honesty, so that students leave my modules with strong analytical tools and a clearer sense of how to use them responsibly.

Current Modules

Undergraduate

  • ECO2009 Econometric Analysis (with John Wildman)
  • ECO3008 Advanced Econometric Analysis

Postgraduate

  • Topics in Microeconomics, with teaching on the economics of crime
  • Economics and Public Policy of Sustainability and Climate Change (with Sara Maioli)

PhD

  • Research Practice in Economics and Finance (with Bahadir Dursun)
  • Advanced teaching in causal inference and applied microeconometrics

Supervision

I supervise undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations as well as PhD students in areas close to my research interests. I am particularly well placed to supervise projects that involve substantial data work, administrative or geocoded data, and advanced econometric methods.

Areas of fit include labour economics, the economics of crime, urban economics, health economics, immigration, and related applied micro topics.

Completed PhD Supervision

  • Hasan Ankara, health economics
  • Muhammad Waqas, labour economics and immigration
  • Bo Gao, international economics and trade policy
  • Eduardo Gonzalo Almorox, health economics and industrial organisation
  • Ana Noveria, labour, education, and health policy
  • Saule Kemelbayeva, education and labour economics
  • Kerry Bray, immigration, austerity, and media
  • Liangxun Xie, public sector and infrastructure economics

Dissertation Supervision

  • Regular undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation supervision at Newcastle University since 2010
  • Recent undergraduate supervision includes 4 dissertations in 2024/25, 4 in 2023/24, and 3 in 2022/23

Teaching History

Undergraduate Modules

  • Econometric Analysis
  • Advanced Econometric Analysis
  • Economic Applications
  • British Economy
  • Introductory Economics
  • Statistical Methods for Economics
  • Economics of Happiness
  • Causal inference and treatment effect estimation
  • Current Topics in Labor Economics and Social Policy

Postgraduate Modules

  • Economics and Public Policy of Sustainability and Climate Change
  • Topics in Microeconomics
  • Cross sectional and panel econometrics
  • Intro to Maths and Stats
  • Methods of Public Economics, Law and Politics I (Quantitative methods)

PhD Modules

  • Research Practice in Economics and Finance
  • Causal inference and applied microeconometrics
  • Causal inference and quasi-experimental methods
  • Applied Microeconometrics
  • Applied Econometrics
  • Empirics in a Nutshell