PhD award for economics lecturer

Dr Vellore Arthi, a lecturer in economics, has been awarded the Allan Nevins Prize for the best PhD dissertation on North American economic history. The winner was announced at the annual meeting of the Economic History Association which took place in San Jose, California.

Arthi wrote her dissertation "Human Capital Formation and the American Dust Bowl" at Oxford University. In it she used advanced techniques to explore both the effects of childhood exposure to the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s on educational attainment, health and disability in later life, as well as the capacity for remediation through compensatory investment in human capital.

This is the first time that the Allan Nevins prize has been awarded to a PhD undertaken in the UK, and only the third time it has been awarded to one undertaken outside of North America. We heartily congratulate Arthi, who joined the Department of Economics in 2016, on her outstanding achievement.