Edward Pinchbeck

Edward, more commonly known as Ted, is a Birmingham Fellow at Birmingham Business School. He is an applied microeconometrician with extensive experience of providing economic advice to policy-makers in central government. Ted’s research interests are in health, urban and spatial economics, and behavioural economics. His program of work as a Birmingham Fellow relates to infrastructure and the links between places, people, and policy. He is especially interested in how locations’ characteristics determine how they withstand or respond to permanent or transitory shocks, and the effects of place and environmental quality on economic outcomes and health. Some of Ted’s projects draw lessons for contemporary society and policy using historical contexts, whereas others examine current settings. For example, one current research strand (with Gibbons, Heblich) examines the effects of the “Beeching Axe” - a massive reduction in railways in 1950-1980 in the UK – on the spatial distribution of the overall population, skilled workers, and the young. A second strand (with Roth, Szumilo, Vanino) uses the housing market to examine for the first time the extent and distribution of the costs of radon: a little-studied indoor pollutant which is the second largest cause of lung cancer after smoking, estimated to be responsible for some 3.8 million global deaths each year.