Working title of research: Essays in empirical macroeconomics and finance

Year of entry: 2023, Part-time

Supervisors: Professor Paul Mizen, Professor David Aikman

Lena is a senior economist and policy advisor at the Bank of England, and a PhD candidate in economics at King’s Business School, King’s College London. Her research interests are in empirical macroeconomics and finance, and involve the use of granular micro-datasets to shed light on questions related to the corporate and financial sectors, and their interactions with monetary, macroprudential and fiscal policies.

Lena currently works in bank stress testing and financial stability at the Bank, and she has previously worked in monetary policy.Lena's current research focus is on corporate taxes, capital allowances and the cost of capital, and their relationship with business investment and productivity.

Her ongoing research projects also include a co-authored project exploring the determinants of corporate price-setting and the existence of non-linearities in the Phillips Curve at a firm level, and a related project on the role of business uncertainty in explaining inflation dynamics. In her future research, Lena plans to explore questions around entrepreneurship, financial intermediation and productive finance.

Lena's research interests closely relate to her policy work at the Bank, which has often resulted in blog posts and other external publications on a range of topics, including business investment, wage growth, labour reallocation, remote working and other structural changes in the economy following the Covid-19 pandemic.

Lena was originally trained in philosophy and modern languages (she is proficient in French and is conversant in Spanish and Arabic). In her pre-Bank career, she spent a few years working in the media sector, both in the private sector and at a media policy think tank, before re-training as an economist while working on economic policy at international organisations (OECD and United Nations ESCAP).

Lena is a longstanding volunteer at the charity Care4Calais, which supports refugees in the UK, France and Belgium.

Academic publications:

‘Firm Inflation Uncertainty’, with Ivan Yotzov, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen and Gregory Thwaites, American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings 2023, 113: 56-60

Working papers:

‘Firming up price inflation’, with Philip Bunn, Nicholas Bloom, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov, Bank of England Staff Working Paper 993; NBER Working Paper 30505

Blog posts and articles:

‘Firm inflation expectations in quantitative and text data’, with Gregory Thwaites, Ivan Yotzov, Özgen Öztürk, Paul Mizen, Philip Bunn and Nicholas Bloom, VoxEU (8 December 2022)

‘Firming up price inflation’, with Ivan Yotzov, Gregory Thwaites, Paul Mizen, Philip Bunn and Nicholas Bloom, VoxEU (26 August 2022)

‘What did we learn from working from home during Covid?’, with John Lewis and Misa Tanaka, Bank Underground (14 June 2022)

‘The impact of the war in Ukraine on economic uncertainty’, with Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov, VoxEU (16 April 2022)

‘Two years on, how has the pandemic affected businesses in the UK?’, with Paul Mizen, Philip Bunn, Nicholas Bloom, Gregory Thwaites and Ivan Yotzov, Economics Observatory (31 March 2022)

‘Remote working, bargaining power and productivity’, Bank Underground (29 March 2022)

‘Covid-19 uncertainty: A tale of two tails’, with Gregory Thwaites, Emil Mihaylov, Paul Mizen, Steven Davis, Brent Meyer, Philip Bunn, Nicholas Bloom, Jose Maria Barrero and David E Altig, VoxEU (16 November 2021)

‘Covid-19 and structural change’, with Gregory Thwaites, Paul Mizen, Philip Bunn and Nicholas Bloom, VoxEU (28 September 2021)

'Labour market reallocation in the wake of Covid-19', with Gregory Thwaites, Emil Mihaylov, Paul Mizen, Julia Leather, Brent Meyer, Steven Davis, Philip Bunn, Nicholas Bloom and Jose Maria Barrero, VoxEU (13 August 2021)

‘Influences on investment by UK businesses’, with Philip Bunn, Myrto Oikonomou, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites and Nicholas Bloom, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin