Nikhil Datta (2017 Cohort)

About me: I am currently a PhD student in Economics at UCL and additionally work as a researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE, working on both labour and trade programmes, with Professor Stephen Machin and Dr Swati Dhingra respectively.

My research: My research is predominantly concerned with modelling and assessing the impacts of the evolving labour market on outcomes of interest, such as wages, employment and life-cycle progression. Technological breakthroughs over the past couple of decades have resulted in firms (within certain markets) being able to maintain a smaller permanent workforce while contracting out specific jobs and tasks. Given this evolution in the labour market I intend to adapt labour demand models to include the ability for firms to engage in expansion and contractions of their workforce while maintaining a stable level of permanent employees.

Furthermore I intend to empirically assess the impact of rising alternative work arrangements on both the worker and firm side. Questions which I wish to address concern the benefits and costs to both parties, the impact on training and skill make-up, and associated active, or potential routes of regulation. Given this research is primarily concerned with welfare impacts of changes to the labour market, it is hoped it will be able to inform public policy.

Supervisor: Professor Uta Shönberg.

Selected publications:

Costa, R., Datta, N., Machin, S., and McNally, S., 2018. Investing in People: The Case for Human Capital Tax Credits. CEP Industrial Strategy Paper CEPIS01.
Datta, N., and Dhingra, S., 2017. Post-Brexit UK trade policy remains a wish list. LSE Brexit [blog] 30 Nov.
Datta, N., and Dhingra, S., 2017. How Not to Do Trade Deals. London Review of Books, 39(18), pp.31–32.
Datta, N., and Dhingra, S., 2017. What next for US-Europe trade policy? In: Chad P. Bown, ed. 2017, Economics and Policy in the Age of Trump. CEPR Press, pp.193–205.