School of Economics

Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021

The results of Research Excellence Framework 2021 has just been announced.

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The School of Economics at the University of Edinburgh has the overarching strategic goal to produce rigorous, high-impact research that helps address key challenges in economics. Over the recent past we have made strategic investments to recruit outstanding new staff and to support colleagues in achieving ambitious goals in research and impact. We have strengthened our links with a network of world-leading research collaborators from Europe and the US and policymakers in the UK and overseas. We are delighted that our achievements have been recognised by the REF2021 subpanel in Economics and Econometrics whose panel experts have determined that over 94.9% of our submitted research publications are either “world leading” or “internationally excellent”.  

Professor Miguel Costa-Gomes, incoming Head of School, who will take up his new position on 1st August, said: “The School’s REF2021 outcome is a wonderful endorsement of its research strategy and achievements over the last seven years. I know that the School has an extremely supportive and collegiate research environment and it is fantastic to see this reflected by the Times Higher Education GPA rankings which ranks the School's research environment as 3rd equal in the UK. I look forward to working with my new colleagues to build on these successes in the future.”

We are continuing to expand and develop our research portfolio. We are developing our existing strengths in economic theory, labour economics, macroeconomics, and empirical economics with a number of new initiatives in health, development, and trade. We believe that our approach of analysing how frictions in the labour, financial and other markets aggregate up to the macroeconomy will become even more relevant and important over the next five-ten years following the disruption caused to labour and other markets across the globe by the coronavirus pandemic. We are expanding our ongoing research in Economic Data Science, exploiting the potential of big data to significantly aid our understanding of financial and labour market interactions and social trends. A further priority is to further develop our research links with our international collaborators, partners, and policymakers.

A list of the School’s ongoing research can be found here. The MacCaLM final conference takes place next week [16th-19th May] with keynote speakers: Mike Elsby, John Moore and Philipp Kircher. The School continues to expand and since the REF201 Census date we have appointed 2 professors, 3 lecturers and 7 early career researchers.