I am an Associate Professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL. I received a PhD in Economics from the University of London (Wye College) in 2008, and joined SSEES UCL in 2012, after a post-doc in the Economics department of the University of Sussex. I also worked as researcher at Kent University (2007-2009) and as online tutor at SOAS (2008-2014). 

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At SSEES, I am a member of the UCL Centre for Comparative Studies of Emerging Economies. I am an Affiliate Researcher at the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN), and a Fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO). 

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My recent work falls into Institutional Economics and Comparative Economics. I am interested in understanding economic behaviour (micro) and development (macro) within economic systems, defined as bundles of formal and informal institutions. My recent research has thus, for example, focused on how values and beliefs relate to, or impact on, economic behaviour, and how specific shocks or life events shape values and beliefs. I have also written about some aspects of growth and development and their relation to values and beliefs. I often focus on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. 

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My research explicitly recognises contributions from other disciplines besides Economics, including Cultural Psychology, Development Studies or Political Sciences, in line with the critical Area Studies tradition of SSEES. 

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In 2018, with Luca Andriani (Centre for Political Economy and Institutional Studies, Birkbeck University of London), Randolph Bruno (Centre for Comparative Studies of Emerging Economies, SSEES - UCL) and Gerhard Schnyder (Institute for International Management, Loughborough University), we launched the Friday Association for Institutional Studies. The association aims to promote pluri-disciplinary discussions on institutions. We organise round-tables and workshops regularly (at least one yearly), and have collectively edited two special issues in the Journal of Institutional Economics, building on these events.

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To find a full record of my publications, please see:

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