Pathway Leaders:
Ian Preston i.preston@ucl.ac.uk
Walter Beckert w.beckert@bbk.ac.uk
Team members:
Ron Smith r.smith@bbk.ac.uk
| Pathway | Institution | Training Route | 1+3 | 2+3 | +3 | +4 | |||||
| Economics | UCL | Economics | ✓ | ✓ | |||||||
| BBK | Economics / Financial Economics | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||||
| BBK | Finance / Mathematical Finance | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||||
The Department of Economics at University College London (UCL) and the Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics (EMS) at Birkbeck provide exceptionally strong and complementary expertise in the field of economics and finance, and have been centrally involved in the operation of the UCL and Bloomsbury DTCs.
Students should apply independently to programmes at UCL and at Birkbeck. Applications will be scrutinised within the two institutions prior to agreement on joint evaluation.
Birkbeck and UCL have a long-established practice of collaborating in PhD training through their Bloomsbury PhD programme, and aim to strengthen these links over the lifetime of the DTP, increasing the range of advanced training modules available to students of both institutions. Contributors from both institutions to teaching on the training pathways have backgrounds in economics, econometrics, statistics, mathematics and computational methods. Hence the Economics pathway will be able to provide substantial training to students in other pathways and groupings, such as Economic and Social History, Education, Health and Wellbeing, Interdisciplinary Area Studies, International Development, Politics, Psychology, Quantitative Social Science, and Social and Policy Studies of Energy and Environment. There is substantial scope for co-supervision, both within the pathway and with International Development, Psychology, and Quantitative Social Science. Birkbeck also has longstanding collaborative arrangements for advanced doctoral training with other London Colleges.
The Economics pathway offers three routes, all of which aim to provide research training at the international frontier, enabling graduates to conduct research of high academic merit and to make original contributions to the subject. All three routes are available in both 1+3 and +3 structures which formed part of provision within the UCL and Bloomsbury DTCs. The 1+3 Economics route at UCL provides core training through the MRes Economics, a highly structured programme with research training comparable to top-10 US economics departments. Entering students are required to hold an MSc in economics with substantial training in economic theory and methods, at a level equivalent to the UCL MSc in Economics/Economic Policy. The programme then provides substantial further subject-specific training in theory and methods, and does so for both full-time and part-time students. At Birkbeck, students on the 1+3 routes in Economics/Financial Economics and Finance/Mathematical Finance are trained in their first year through the MScs in Economics or Financial Economics; and Finance, Financial Engineering or Financial Risk Management respectively.
