Matthew Johnson

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Health Case for Basic Income; Social determinants of health; Welfare reform; Participatory research.

Completed PhDs
2022-2024: Howard Reed: ‘Microsimulation of the impacts of tax, social security and public spending changes on living standards, the income distribution and health: Methodological advances and an application to Basic Income policies’. Lead supervisor, co-supervised with Elliott Johnson, and examined by Prof Guy Standing, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS, and Prof Evelyn Forget, Professor of Economics and Community Health Sciences, University of Manitoba. This thesis builds upon and summarises Reed’s decades of experience as an economist (Chief Economist IPPR, IFS) focusing on analysis of the distributional impacts of welfare policies within the United Kingdom. Reed’s work has highlighted the negative impacts of a range of conventional fiscal policies and provides groundbreaking evidence on scope for redistributive reform.

2022-2024: Graham Stark: ‘Understanding the distributive impacts of tax-benefit policy: development of microsimulation techniques to provide new insights into reform’. Lead Supervisor, co-supervised with Daniel Nettle and examined by Prof Jason Madan, Professor of Health Economics, Warwick Medical School, and Prof Tim Callan, ESRI. This thesis builds on Stark’s decades of experience in industry (creator of the IFS Tax-Ben model) to examine the distributional impacts of reform within Scotland via the design, creation and implementation of the Virtual Worlds microsimulation model. His TriplePC enables consideration of trade-offs between fairness and simplicity in policymaking.

2019-2024: Kathryn Loosemore: ‘The relationship between material conditions, public opinion, and the violence of ETA, the Basque terrorist group (1959-2018)’. Lead Supervisor, co-supervised with Ian Robson and examined by Dr Sarah Marsden, Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), University of St Andrews, and Prof Irene Hardill, Professor of Public Policy, Northumbria University. This thesis provides a ground-breaking comprehensive analysis of the scale of impact of ETA’s activity and the direction of its relationship with public opinion. It has involved creation of the most comprehensive database of ETA’s activities produced to date. The resulting database suggests that ETA’s impact is significantly greater than previously recognized, with a total of 1,047 attacks from 1959 to 2010, suggesting that previous records underestimate the total number of people killed by over 100, with injuries often not previously recorded at all. The work is an extension of Kathryn’s work as COO of Kantar and, before May 2022 Vice President Operations, Thomson Reuters. In those roles she was concerned with accurate reporting of terrorist activities and is engaging with a range of international organisations to test and disseminate the database.