Catching up with Stone Centre PhD Scholar Joern Onken

Joern Onken was one of the Stone Centre at UCL’s first PhD Scholars back in 2022. We caught up with Joern to find out what he’s been up to since then, and how the Stone Centre’s support helped him.

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How did you become involved with the Stone Centre?

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I was one of the inaugural Stone PhD scholars. The Centre’s mission fit naturally with my PhD agenda, so I applied for and was fortunate to receive a Stone PhD Scholarship.

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What did you study for your PhD?

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I work in macroeconomics, focusing on how individual heterogeneity shapes aggregate outcomes such as inequality – and how inequality in turn affects individuals. For example, one chapter of my dissertation studies how the aggregate economy is shifting towards luxury sectors – which affects everyone, including people who barely consume luxuries. Another chapter analyses how uncertainty about future technological progress influences workers’ skill investments, and therefore the aggregate skill distribution and productivity in the economy.

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How did the Stone PhD Scholarship help you?

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The scholarship reduced my teaching load at the start of my PhD, which provided me with extra time. I used this to advance my existing research and to learn numerical methods, which are now benefitting my new research projects.

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As part of the scholarship, I also developed an open-access teaching resource that is now part of CORE’s Doing Economics series. In "Female Labour Supply and the Macroeconomy", students explore the macroeconomic effects of the growth and subsequent flattening out of women’s participation in the labour market from the 1940s to the 2020s. This relates directly to macroeconomic research (including mine) showing that differences at the micro (household) level have important implications for the macroeconomy. The goal for students is to assess whether such a link also exists between growing female labour supply on the household side, and aggregate economic phenomena on the macro side. In doing so, students are guided through some of the key parts of a typical macroeconomic research project, such as obtaining suitable datasets, cleaning them, and analysing them to answer interesting research questions.

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What have you done since your scholarship?

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I have started new research projects on several aspects of inequality (such as luxury consumption, worker skills, housing) and presented work-in-progress at internal and external seminars and conferences. I am currently in the process of further advancing my projects, especially my job market paper, and writing them up for my dissertation.

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What do you plan to do in the future?

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I am nearing the final phase of my PhD and hope to continue contributing to our understanding of inequality thereafter.

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Many thanks to Joern for taking the time to speak with us. We wish you the best of luck with the rest of your PhD and look forward to following your progress in future.

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