̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Faculty of Economics

10 Cambridge AI spinouts

skbf2 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:20:09 +0000

Meet 10 Cambridge spinouts, all hoping to harness the potential of AI for the good of the planet and its people.

̽��ֱ��price of ecological breakdown

fpjl2 — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 23:00:00 +0000

Cambridge researchers are investigating the economic consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss, and identifying ways to drive a more sustainable global economy.

Partha Dasgupta wins BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Economics

plc32 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:14:23 +0000

̽��ֱ��16th edition of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management honours Professor Dasgupta for his work in defining the field of environmental economics by incorporating and quantifying the social value of nature.

̽��ֱ��award also takes into account Professor Dasgupta's leadership of an independent, global review on the Economics of Biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury in 2019. ̽��ֱ��Dasgupta Review is expected to help set the agenda for the UK Government’s 25-year environment plan.

̽��ֱ��BBVA awards committee said it commended Professor Dasgupta for laying the foundations of environmental economics through his pioneering work “on the interaction between economic life and the natural environment, including biodiversity.”

“More than any other economist of our time, Partha Dasgupta has stressed the important interplay between economic life and the natural environment," Chair of the BBVA selection committee and Nobel Economics laureate Eric Maskin said, adding that Dasgupta’s work and his proposals for measuring economic well-being “are critical for our time.”

̽��ֱ��citation for the award said that Professor Dasgupta provided conceptual foundations for the definition and measurement of sustainable development with the social value of nature as a determining factor. That in contrast with measures of well-being based on flows such as GDP, Dasgupta proposed measuring sustainable development as the change in the accounting value of total wealth, including natural capital within this indicator.

“These ideas...have provided a framework for green accounting which is now widely adopted for measuring sustainable development,” the citation concludes.

“Most economists who work on natural resources or the environment think about nature as providing certain types of goods, like food, clean water, timber, fibres or pharmaceuticals,” Professor Dasgupta said. “So these are goods. These are objects that you can harvest from nature and transform with our human ingenuity into a final product, like the clothes we are wearing or the painting in the room where you are sitting, and so forth. These are the things we make out of the goods that nature gives us.”

At the core of this conventional line of economic thought, he explains, is that when a good becomes scarce, you can substitute it with another offering the same or similar results. But as he delved deeper into the subject, Dasgupta came to realize that nature supplies something much more important and irreplaceable than goods. It supplies processes (or in more economic terms, services).

“My own understanding of economics,” he said, “has moved away from goods to processes. These are the key things we economists should keep in mind. Of course we care about nature’s goods, like water, food and clothing, because without them we wouldn’t be here. But none of this would exist without the underlying processes of nature.”

Climate regulation is among the services, or processes, that Dasgupta uses to illustrate his point: sunlight comes and gets reflected into space, water evaporates and comes down as rain.

“You have the water cycle and you get your drinking water from it. And what is not consumed doesn’t disappear, it just evaporates or becomes part of the ocean through the river system and so forth. But if you mess around too much with climate, you also mess around with the water cycle, which will end up weakened. Likewise, if you deforest too much or get rid of biodiversity in the Amazon, you’re going to exacerbate the climate system. So my work has been to bring these issues into economics.”

Dasgupta believes economics has become over-reliant on the idea that scarcity can be overcome by substituting goods.

“In industrial production, of course, this idea of substitutability has been a great success. Think of all the materials that are produced in engineering departments or material science departments. But there are limits to this, when you tamper with processes. Just think of the human body. You have the metabolic process, which keeps you in a healthy state, and it would be foolish to think you could substitute one process for another. You wouldn’t say let me have less digestive capacity, but more running capacity. It would be silly, because these two things go together.”

̽��ֱ��BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the recognition of talent.

̽��ֱ��BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognise and reward contributions of singular impact in physics and chemistry, mathematics, biology and biomedicine, technology, environmental sciences (climate change, ecology and conservation biology), economics, social sciences, the humanities and music, privileging those that significantly enlarge the stock of knowledge in a discipline, open up new fields, or build bridges between disciplinary areas.

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta (Economics, St. John's) wins the BBVA award for Economics, Finance and Management for his groundbreaking work in environmental economics.

More than any other economist of our time, Partha Dasgupta has stressed the important interplay between economic life and the natural environment

Nobel Economics laureate Eric Maskin

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Religious people coped better with Covid-19 pandemic, research suggests

fpjl2 — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:21:15 +0000

People of religious faith may have experienced lower levels of unhappiness and stress than secular people during the UK’s Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, according to a new ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge study released as a working paper.

̽��ֱ��findings follow recently published Cambridge-led research suggesting that worsening mental health after experiencing Covid infection – either personally or in those close to you – was also somewhat ameliorated by religious belief. This study looked at the US population during early 2021.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge economists argue that – taken together – these studies show that religion may act as a bulwark against increased distress and reduced wellbeing during times of crisis, such as a global public health emergency.

“Selection biases make the wellbeing effects of religion difficult to study,” said Prof Shaun Larcom from Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy, and co-author of the latest study. “People may become religious due to family backgrounds, innate traits, or to cope with new or existing struggles.”

“However, the Covid-19 pandemic was an extraordinary event affecting everyone at around the same time, so we could gauge the impact of a negative shock to wellbeing right across society. This provided a unique opportunity to measure whether religion was important for how some people deal with a crisis.”

Larcom and his Cambridge colleagues Prof Sriya Iyer and Dr Po-Wen She analysed survey data collected from 3,884 people in the UK during the first two national lockdowns, and compared it to three waves of data prior to the pandemic.

They found that while lockdowns were associated with a universal uptick in unhappiness, the average increase in feeling miserable was 29% lower for people who described themselves as belonging to a religion.*

̽��ֱ��researchers also analysed the data by “religiosity”: the extent of an individual’s commitment to religious beliefs, and how central it is to their life. Those for whom religion makes “some or a great difference” in their lives experienced around half the increase in unhappiness seen in those for whom religion makes little or no difference.**

“ ̽��ֱ��study suggests that it is not just being religious, but the intensity of religiosity that is important when coping with a crisis,” said Larcom.

Those self-identifying as religious in the UK are more likely to have certain characteristics, such as being older and female. ̽��ֱ��research team “controlled” for these statistically to try and isolate the effects caused by faith alone, and still found that the probability of religious people having an increase in depression was around 20% lower than non-religious people.

There was little overall difference between Christians, Muslims and Hindus – followers of the three biggest religions in the UK. However, the team did find that wellbeing among some religious groups appeared to suffer more than others when places of worship were closed during the first lockdown.

“ ̽��ֱ��denial of weekly communal attendance appears to have been particularly affecting for Catholics and Muslims,” said Larcom.

For the earlier study, authored by Prof Sriya Iyer, along with colleagues Kishen Shastry, Girish Bahal and Anand Shrivastava from Australia and India, researchers used online surveys to investigate Covid-19 infections among respondents or their immediate family and friends, as well as religious beliefs, and mental health.

̽��ֱ��study was conducted during February and March 2021, and involved 5,178 people right across the United States, with findings published in the journal European Economic Review in November 2023.

Researchers found that almost half those who reported a Covid-19 infection either in themselves or their immediate social network experienced an associated reduction in wellbeing.

Where mental health declined, it was around 60% worse on average for the non-religious compared to people of faith with typical levels of “religiosity”.***

Interestingly, the positive effects of religion were not found in areas with strictest lockdowns, suggesting access to places of worship might be even more important in a US context. ̽��ֱ��study also found significant uptake of online religious services, and a 40% lower association between Covid-19 and mental health for those who used them.****

“Religious beliefs may be used by some as psychological resources that can shore up self-esteem and add coping skills, combined with practices that provide social support,” said Prof Iyer, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics.

“ ̽��ֱ��pandemic presented an opportunity to glean further evidence of this in both the United Kingdom and the United States, two nations characterised by enormous religious diversity.”

Added Larcom: “These studies show a relationship between religion and lower levels of distress during a global crisis. It may be that religious faith builds resilience, and helps people cope with adversity by providing hope, consolation and meaning in tumultuous times.”

Two Cambridge-led studies suggest that the psychological distress caused by lockdowns (UK) and experience of infection (US) was reduced among those of faith compared to non-religious people.

Getty/Luis Alvarez

People in church praying with covid-19 restrictions

Notes

* ̽��ֱ��increase in the mean measure for unhappiness was 6.1 percent for people who do not identify with a religion during the lockdown, compared to an increase of 4.3 percent for those who do belong to a religion – a difference of 29%.

**For those that religion makes little or no difference, the increase was 6.3 percent. For those for whom religion makes some or a great difference, the increase was around half that, at 3 percent and 3.5 percent respectively.

*** This was after controlling for various demographic and environmental traits, including age, race, income, and average mental health rates prior to the pandemic.

**** ̽��ֱ��interpretation is from Column 1 of Table 5: Determinants of mental health, online access to religion. Where the coefficients of Covid {Not accessed online service} is 2.265 and Covid {Accessed online service} is 1.344. Hence the difference is 2.265-1.344 = 0.921 which is 40% of 2.265.

Yes

‘Smart’ drugs can decrease productivity in people who don’t have ADHD, study finds

fpjl2 — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:58:04 +0000

New research from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the ̽��ֱ�� of Melbourne, published in Science Advances, shows neurotypical workers and students taking cognitive enhancers, or ‘smart’ drugs, may actually be inhibiting their performance and productivity.

Drugs such as methylphenidate, sold under the brand name Ritalin among others, are commonly prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but are also taken by those without a diagnosis, in the belief that the drugs will enhance focus and cognitive performance.

In four double-blinded, randomised trials in Melbourne, each a week apart, the same 40 healthy participants took one of three popular ‘smart’ drugs (methylphenidate, modafinil or dextroamphetamine) or a placebo. They were assessed on how they performed in a test designed to model the complex decision-making and problem-solving present in our everyday lives.

While previous studies into the effects of smart drugs have used simpler cognitive tasks targeting memory or attention, the Melbourne trial involved more computationally complex activities that better simulate the difficult nature of tasks people encounter in daily life.

Participants were asked to complete an exercise known as the Knapsack Optimisation Problem – or ‘knapsack task’ – in which they were given a virtual knapsack with a set capacity, and a selection of items of different weights and values. ̽��ֱ��participants had to figure out how to best allocate items to the bag, to maximise the overall value of its contents.

Overall, participants taking the drugs saw small decreases in accuracy and efficiency, along with large increases in time and effort, relative to their results when not taking the drugs.

For example, when given methylphenidate – often used to treat ADHD in children, but increasingly taken by college students cramming for exams – participants took around 50% longer on average to complete the knapsack problem as when they were given a placebo.

In addition, participants who performed at a higher level in the placebo condition compared to the rest of the group tended to show a bigger decrease in performance and productivity after receiving a drug.

In terms of 'productivity', for example – the level of progress per item moved in or out of the knapsack – the participants in the top 25% under a placebo regularly ended up in the bottom 25% under methylphenidate.

By contrast, participants who had a lower performance in a placebo condition only very occasionally exhibited a slight improvement after taking a drug.

Professor Peter Bossaerts, Leverhulme International Professor of Neuroeonomics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, believes more research needs to be conducted to find out what effects the drugs are having on users without ADHD.

“Our results suggest that these drugs don’t actually make you ‘smarter’,” said Bossaerts. “Because of the dopamine the drugs induce, we expected to see increased motivation, and they do motivate one to try harder. However, we discovered that this exertion caused more erratic thinking — in ways that we could make precise because the knapsack task had been widely studied in computer science.

“Performance did not generally increase, so questions remain about how the drugs are affecting people’s minds and their decision making.”

Dr Elizabeth Bowman researcher at the Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets at the ̽��ֱ�� of Melbourne and lead author of the study said the results show we have yet to establish the effectiveness of pharmaceutical enhancers on our performance, when used by neurotypical people to perform everyday complex tasks.

“Our research shows drugs that are expected to improve cognitive performance in patients may actually be leading to healthy users working harder while producing a lower quality of work in a longer amount of time,” said Bowman.

Smart drugs do motivate people, but the added effort can lead to “erratic thinking”, adversely affecting above-average performers, according to researchers.

Our results suggest that these drugs don’t actually make you ‘smarter’

Peter Bossaerts

Getty images

Drug graphic

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge achievers recognised in New Year Honours

ps748 — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 08:33:45 +0000

Economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta receives an elevated knighthood. Sir Partha, the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics, is made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire for services to economics and the natural environment.

Another economist, Dr Graham Gudgin, of the Centre for Business Research, is awarded a CBE for services to economic development in Northern Ireland. He said: "I am delighted to receive this honour in recognition of my time in Belfast running the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre, as Special Advisor to First Minister, David Trimble, and working with Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, on tax reform for Northern Ireland. It was an honour to be able to use my experience as a member of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group to advance economic ideas and practice in Northern Ireland."

Professor Krishna Chatterjee, Professor of Endocrinology at the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, is also awarded a CBE for services to people with endocrine disorders. He said: “I am delighted that my contributions to endocrine disorders have been honoured in this way. This also represents the efforts of many scientists and clinical colleagues in Cambridge, and internationally, with whom I have worked over the years. Together with the patients participating in our research, we strive to advance knowledge and outcomes in rare hormone disorders."

An MBE is awarded to Elizabeth Blane, a laboratory manager for services to pathogen genome sequencing, and Natural Sciences undergraduate, Dara McAnulty, receives the British Empire Medal for services to nature and the autistic community in his native Northern Ireland. At 18, Dara, a student at Queens' College, is the youngest person to feature in this year's list. His 'Diary of a Young Naturalist' won the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Nature Conservation.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��'s Acting Vice-Chancellor, Dr Anthony Freeling, congratulated those being honoured: "How wonderful to see people so closely linked to the Collegiate ̽��ֱ�� being recognised in the New Year Honours list. It’s gratifying to see dedicated service acknowledged and rewarded in this way. My warmest congratulations to those colleagues and friends of the ̽��ֱ�� who have been honoured for their commitment and their achievements."

A number of academics, staff and an undergraduate student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge feature in this year's New Year Honours List, the first of the reign of King Charles III.

It's gratifying to see dedicated service acknowledged and rewarded in this way

Dr Anthony Freeling

Senate House

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Beyond GDP: Time to measure inclusive wealth and revolutionise economics

fpjl2 — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 09:18:11 +0000

Cambridge economists are at the forefront of a global movement to create new statistical methods that include vital components of prosperity – from nature to social bonds – currently absent from national accounting.

Study reveals ‘drastic changes’ to daily routines during UK lockdowns

fpjl2 — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 17:51:02 +0000

This is according to a new study of “time-use diaries” kept by 766 UK citizens from across the social spectrum during three points in time: the last month of normality, the first lockdown, and the last lockdown in March of this year.

Economists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Queen Mary ̽��ֱ�� of London collected data that charted time spent on activities during both typical work and nonwork days to map changes to the rhythm of life for millions.

̽��ֱ��study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, found marked differences between genders, particularly parents of young children, and that increases in odd working hours and downtime spent alone were detrimental to wellbeing.

“ ̽��ֱ��lockdowns resulted in drastic changes to patterns of time use, disrupting routines and blurring the distinction between work and family life,” said co-author Dr Ines Lee from Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics.

“We have hopefully seen the end of lockdowns, but our study holds lessons for hybrid working, as splitting time between home and office becomes more common.”

“Employers should promote better work-life balance in the post-pandemic world. This could include limits on emails outside working hours, home-working schedules that suit parents, and options for younger workers left isolated by reduced in-person networking,” said Lee.

̽��ֱ��researchers looked at amounts of time each individual spent on activities in four broad categories: employment (excluding commutes); “housework” (from shopping to childcare); leisure (e.g. hobbies or home entertainment); subsistence (meals, sleeping, personal care).

While previous studies have focused on the initial lockdown, this is one of the first to examine the effects of repeated COVID-19 containment measures on our lives and routines.

Before Covid arrived, 86% of the sample was employed, but this fell to 63% in the first lockdown and 74% in the third. Mothers of young children were significantly less likely to be employed than fathers by the third lockdown.

For those employed before and during lockdowns, people with at least one young child spent an average of 43 fewer minutes a day on their paid job in the first lockdown, and 32 fewer minutes in the third, compared to pre-pandemic.

For those without young children it was an average decrease of 28 minutes and 22 minutes a day on paid work respectively.

Women with young children spent around an hour less on paid work a day than men and women without young children. This was mainly a reduction in time spent on actual work tasks rather than, for example, meetings.

During the first lockdown, the average time women spent on housework increased by 28 minutes a day, while for men the average time spent on subsistence activities (e.g. sleeping and eating) increased by 30 minutes. By 2021 these changes had evened out.

Life with small children during this year’s lockdown meant an extra hour of housework a day over pre-pandemic levels. Mothers of young kids did 67 more minutes of housework a day than fathers. Only women saw an increase in cooking and cleaning (time spent on caring duties was spread across genders).

̽��ֱ��study suggests that parents often forfeited leisure time. Living with young kids was associated with a drop in leisure activities of almost an hour a day in both lockdowns – and income levels made no difference to this loss of downtime.

For those without young kids, leisure time increased – but much of it was spent alone. By the third lockdown, people with no small children had around an extra hour of solitary leisure time a day over pre-pandemic levels.

However, in terms of quality – the self-reported “enjoyment” of given activities – this solo leisure time felt less pleasurable during the last lockdown than it had prior to the pandemic.

̽��ֱ��third lockdown also saw around 20% of individuals spend more time working unusual hours (outside 0830-1730) compared to the pre-pandemic period, which reduced the reported enjoyment of their day overall.

Those earning £5k a month or more, worked almost two extra hours a day than people earning less than £1k a month by the last lockdown. High earners also spent less time on subsistence activities during both lockdowns.

Overall, the third lockdown felt a bit more miserable than the first, according to the research.

While there was little change in the enjoyment of various activities in the early days of Covid, with men even reporting slightly higher “quality” of time during lockdown one, by March of this year enjoyment of activities was around 5% lower than pre-pandemic levels across the board.

Dr Eileen Tipoe, co-author from Queen Mary ̽��ֱ�� of London, said: “It is no surprise that having to do more work outside of typical working hours meant that people were substantially unhappier during the third lockdown.

“And it was concerning to find that women, and especially those with young children, were disproportionately affected by lockdown – for example being less likely to be employed and the fact that only women spent more time cooking and cleaning.”

Some spent an extra hour a day on chores and childcare during lockdowns, while others got an added daily hour of solo leisure time – and most of us reduced time spent on paid work by around half an hour a day.

̽��ֱ��lockdowns resulted in drastic changes to patterns of time use, disrupting routines and blurring the distinction between work and family life

Ines Lee

Charles Deluvio via Unsplash

Child and mother during lockdown

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