Getting to know Alexander Vickery, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics

What are you doing at the Department of Economics?

I joined the academic staff in September 2021 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. The fellowship is a 36-month award and allows me to pursue an independent research project.

What is your research about?

I am an applied microeconomist. My research interests include marriage market theory and applications, models of household decision making, child development and education outcomes.

I am currently working two projects with similar themes:

The first project studies the development of academic skills through adolescence in anticipation of entry to university. The setting is internationally unique in terms of spending on private tutoring and competition for university places. I look at how heterogeneity in household income and child skills affects parents’ decisions to invest in private education, and how these choices contribute to inequality in university admissions, and to social mobility in lifetime earnings.

In the second project we attempt to understand the effects of exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) on the accumulation of children’s non-cognitive and cognitive skills.

Overall, these projects help us to understand how skills develop in unison and how they interact to evaluate policy interventions that can be effective at improving outcomes for disadvantaged children.

What do you enjoy the most about undertaking your research at the Economics Department at Royal Holloway? 

Academically: The department is home to the Economics of the Household (EcHo) research centre which is fantastic for me because it includes a group of internationally established researchers that work on modelling household behaviour.

Subjectively: The beautiful campus! There are so many green spaces to enjoy and have lunch with colleagues, also, for a few days a year we even get some nice weather to match.

What do you do in your free time?

In my free time I play golf and enjoy watching sports and esports. I play at Silvermere golf club (near Weybridge) and am keen for my new colleagues to join me.