PhD Students
Simone Arrigoni
Simone is a full-time PhD candidate in Economics supervised by Agustín Bénétrix and Davide Romelli. His research interests lie in the area of international macroeconomics and include global imbalances and capital flows, globalisation, inequality, and monetary policy spillovers. Before joining Trinity College Dublin in 2020, Simone was first a graduate trainee and then worked as an analyst in the International Policy Analysis division at the European Central Bank. While working at the ECB he undertook research in constructing and comparing global financial condition indices and studied the role of population ageing in assessing external current account imbalances. He holds a Master's degree in Economics from Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg (Germany) and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business from the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy).
Andre Pacheco
Andre is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Professor Agustín Bénétrix. His research interests include international macroeconomics, macro-finance and monetary policy. Before starting his PhD at Trinity College Dublin, he worked as a macroeconomist and strategist at Banco BTG Pactual and in other asset management companies prior to that. He has also worked as a visiting researcher at the Sao Paulo School of Economics (FGV-EESP). Andre holds a master’s degree in Economics from New York University (NYU) and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Sao Paulo.
Angelos Athanasopoulos
Angelos Athanasopoulos is PhD candidate at the Department of Economics under the supervision of Prof. Davide Romelli. His research interests include central bank institutional design and communications, macro-finance and the role of credit in the business cycle, and economic history. Before joining Trinity College Dublin he has worked at the Banque de France and in the private sector in banking and asset management. He has previous degrees from University College Dublin, MIT and the University of Athens, and is a Provost's PhD Award scholar.
Conor Parle
Conor Parle is a part time PhD candidate in economics, with research interests in central bank communication and the links between natural language processing methods and econometrics. Currently he works as an economist in the monetary policy division of the Central Bank of Ireland. Previously, he completed an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Economics (2015, TCD), masters degree in statistics (2016, TCD) and masters degree in economics (2019, TCD).
Stephen Byrne
Stephen Byrne is a part-time PhD candidate supervised by Professor Agustín Bénétrix. His research focuses on applied macroeconomics and labour markets. His first paper generates a new measure of labour market slack for a selection of euro-area economies, which explains low wage growth in the bloc over the period 2013 to 2017. His current research focuses on productivity in Europe. He also works as a senior economist in the Economic Analysis division of the Central Bank of Ireland, where he works on the team responsible for producing forecasts for the Irish economy as well as conducting research. Stephen holds an M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Sussex.
Simone Cima
Simone Cima is a part-time PhD candidate under the supervision of Joseph Kopecky. He works as an associate economist in the Irish Economic Analysis division of the Central Bank of Ireland, focussing on forecasting and research on the Irish economy. His research interests include the role of demographics in the macroeconomy, and issues around income and wealth inequality. Simone has been a trainee at the ECB and holds a MSc in Applied Economics from University College Dublin.
Beren Demirölmez
Beren Demirölmez started her PhD in Economics in 2019 under the supervision of Agustín Bénétrix. Her research focuses on international macroeconomics, financial globalization, and international capital flows. She is currently undertaking research on the role of composition of external imbalances (asset types, currencies, and geography) in shocks transmission and wealth transfers. Before joining Trinity College Dublin, she obtained a BSc and MSc in Economics, and a minor in Statistics from the Middle East Technical University, in Turkey. During her post graduate education in METU, she worked as a research assistant and taught economics, statistics and econometrics.
Alexis de Saint Lager
Alexis de Saint Lager is a PhD student in the department of Economics under the supervision of Joseph Kopecky. He is interested in fiscal consolidation in the new age of japanification. In particular, looking at the effects of the consumption tax hike in ageing societies. More broadly, his research interests include topics related to fiscal policy issues, that is government spending, tax policy and government debt.
Lorenz Emter
Lorenz Emter is an Economist at the Central Bank of Ireland and a part-time PhD Candidate supervised by Agustín Bénétrix. His research interests are focused on international macro-financial linkages and financial stability. His current work studies the international transmission of U.S. financial shocks to the conditional distribution of output growth in countries around the world, as well as the determinants of sudden stops in cross-border capital flows. Lorenz has been an ECB Schuman Programme participant at Deutsche Bundesbank and a trainee the European Central Bank. He holds an MSc in Economics from Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg.
Donata Faccia
Donata Faccia is a part-time PhD candidate in Economics supervised by Agustín Bénétrix. Her research interests include exchange rate economics, the bank lending channel and climate change. Her first PhD paper contributes to the new stream of literature on the trilemma, by looking at the interplay between credit growth and open macroeconomic policies in emerging market economies. Using a unique dataset where credit rejections are matched with firm and bank characteristics, her second PhD paper studies the role of firm and bank weakness in the credit crunch observed in the euro area during the sovereign debt crisis and in credit developments characterising the post-crisis recovery. Currently, she is studying the impact of climate change on price stability. Donata works as an economist at the European Central Bank in the European Institutions and Fora Division. Previously, she worked as an economist and speech writer in the office of the Deputy Governor - Central Banking at the Central Bank of Ireland, after having worked as associate economist in the Monetary Policy division. In her career, she also worked at the European Commission and in the International Policy Analysis division at the European Central Bank. Donata holds a Master degree from the College of Europe, Bruges campus.
Jan-Luca Hennig
Jan-Luca joined Trinity in 2016 to undertake research on labour economics. In his thesis, he tackles three different topics within labor economics, ranging from the rise of China in global commodity markets and their impact on employment and wages in European regions, the gender wage gap in Europe and its decomposition, and the impact of labour market polarization on younger generations, especially in terms of their education decision and social mobility. During the PhD, he worked as a research intern at the OECD, and he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University sponsored by Donald Davis. Before starting his PhD at Trinity, Jan-Luca obtained an MSc in Economics from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and undertook a BSc in International Economics at the University of Tübingen, both in Germany.
Asi Mbelu
Asi Mbelu is a PhD candidate in Economics under the supervision of Prof. Davide Romelli. Her research interests are in macroeconomics, in particular banking, finance and monetary policy. Her first paper constructed a financial conditions index for the sub-Saharan African region. Before starting her PhD, she previously worked at the South African Reserve Bank as a junior economist and interned at the International Monetary Fund where she examined the impact of the declining oil prices on the banking system of African oil-exporting countries. She also participated the Advanced Studies Course at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. She is currently working on liquidity spillovers in the banking sector.
Jonathan Rice
is currently undertaking his PhD part-time under the supervision of Agustín Bénétrix. Jonathan has experience in both research and industry, having worked both as an Economist in the Macroeconomic Modelling Unit at the Central Bank of Ireland and as a manager in a large commercial bank. His past research includes; economic uncertainty spill-overs to small open economies, estimating shock dependency in exchange rate pass-through, international trade and non-tariff barriers and balance sheet concentration risk in financial institutions.