Inaugural Lecture: Eleonora Fichera and Matt Dickson

Join us for this joint inaugural lecture from Professor Eleonora Fichera and Professor Matt Dickson.

There will be time for questions and discussion and the lectures will be followed by a drinks reception.

Professor Eleonora Fichera: The wider determinants of health: applied economics and big data for policy-relevant research

Physical health and well-being are key components of human capital. Individuals and societies contribute to the socioeconomic and commercial determinants of health such as education, economic resources, and the physical and built environment. However, it is often difficult to establish the causal impact of, what economists call, “inputs” of health production (or “wider determinants of health”). This lecture will investigate the challenges and opportunities in using “quasi-experiments”, and large survey and administrative data to investigate the wider determinants of health and their relevance for policy.

Professor Matt Dickson: ‘Education, Education, and Education’ – is it really worth it?

In the UK, the government spends around £116 billion per year on education, making it the second-largest element in public spending after health. There are good reasons for this: at the individual level having more education is associated with being more likely to be employed, earning more, and having better health, wellbeing, and longevity. More educated societies have lower crime, greater trust, more cohesion, and more productive economies. But how much of the positive association between education and outcomes is a causal effect and how much is because the people who choose more education are the type of people who will be happier, healthier, and wealthier whatever they do education-wise? This lecture will look at how “quasi-experiments” and large datasets help us establish the causal effects of education and show that by-and-large it is indeed ‘worth it’ for individuals and for governments.

This event is hosted by the Department of Economics and the Institute for Policy Research (IPR), University of Bath.

Speaker profiles

Eleonora Fichera is Professor of Applied Economics. She joined the Department of Economics in March 2017 as Senior Lecturer. She was Acting Head of the Economics Department in 2022/23, Deputy Head of Department between 2019-2022 and became Reader in 2019. Since January 2022 she is co-Editor of Health Economics, including its Letters section. She sits on the Welcomes’ Social Sciences Discovery Advisory Group. Her research investigates the socio-economic determinants of health in high and low-and-middle income countries. She has obtained grants from, amongst others, the Medical Research Council (MRC), MRC jointly with DFiD and ESRC, the National Institute for Health Research, the Royal Economic Society, and has undertaken various consultancy projects.

Matt Dickson is a quantitative researcher specialising in applied econometric methods and the use of large-scale administrative and survey datasets to address questions in economics, social policy, and public policy. An economist by training, Matt’s research is primarily in the economics of education, with particular focus on the returns to education, the graduate labour market, social mobility, and widening participation in higher education. Matt is committed to policy-relevant research that furthers the public good and has given advice to numerous government departments and related bodies including HM Treasury, the Dept. for Education, the Dept. for Work and Pensions, the Welsh Government, the Low Pay Commission, and the Social Mobility Commission, as well as co-authoring five major research reports for government. He previously held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Bristol (2009-2011) and University College Dublin (2011-2012) before joining the University of Bath as a Prize Fellow in the Dept. of Social and Policy Sciences in 2012. In 2017 Matt took up the position of Reader in Public Policy at the University’s Institute for Policy Research, leading the programme of research on widening participation in higher education. Matt was promoted to Professor of Economic and Social Policy in October 2023.

Access information

3 West North has automatic doors at the main entrance. There are lifts inside the building. There are accessible toilets inside the building. Visit AccessAble for more information.

Room 2.1 is a tiered lecture and has wheelchair access. It does not have a hearing loop.

There are Blue Badge spaces in all campus car parks. View an accessibility map of parking and wheelchair access points on campus. Visit the Campus Car Parks page on AccessAble for more information.

If you have a question about access, please contact us via Eventbrite or email us at ipr@bath.ac.uk