PhD students on the academic job market
The following Cambridge Judge Business School PhD students are currently seeking academic positions. Similar recent PhD graduates have taken postdoctoral or faculty positions at leading research institutions such as Erasmus, IESE Business School, London Business School, Warwick Business School, Imperial College Business School, University College London and INSEAD Asia.
Rhys Williams
Rhys Williams is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Christos Genakos, Michael Pollitt and Kamiar Mohaddes. His research interests are in applied microeconomics, with a focus on questions related to competition, IO and healthcare. Broadly speaking, he is interested in understanding how competition works in the economy and whether government policy can improve the functioning of markets.
Job market paper
“Who gets the dough? Explaining the gluten-free price premium”
Gluten-free (GF) food products are substantially more expensive than their conventional counterparts, raising concerns about inequality for individuals with coeliac disease and gluten intolerance. This paper decomposes that premium into its underlying economic causes. Focusing on the UK bread market – where GF products are 4 times as expensive, per kilogram, as conventional bread – I estimate a structural discrete-choice demand model. I use weekly household-level scanner data on bread purchases between 2017 and 2019, covering over 27,000 households and 3.3 million shopping occasions. Marginal costs are recovered under the assumption of multi-product Bertrand–Nash competition. Preliminary results indicate that own-price elasticity of demand is similar between gluten-free and regular bread. Calculating mark-ups and recovering marginal costs reveals that the gluten-free price premium is almost entirely explained by higher marginal costs. High gluten-free prices therefore appear to reflect the cost of supply rather than price discrimination, with direct implications for the design of policy interventions aimed at improving affordability.
Monika Żebrowska
Monika is a PhD graduate whose research seeks to advance more human-centric perspectives on work, organising, and institutional dynamics. She is interested in exploring how humans relate to their work, organisations, and institutions, how they derive meanings and value from them, and conversely, how such engagements and motivations shape institutional and organisational processes. In relation to this, her research predominantly focuses on craft and community organising to explore the resilience, continuity, and complexity of cherished social structures.
Before her PhD at Cambridge Judge Business School, Monika earned an MPhil in Innovation, Strategy and Organisation at the University of Cambridge and a BA in Business and Management from Durham University.
Job market paper
“Hooked on a thread: meaningful craft livelihoods as a pathway to craft resilience”
Recent research on craft suggests it is resurging and thriving. We argue instead that craft practice is naturally fragile and difficult to sustain in modern society. While previous research has explored tensions related to craft’s fragility, we lack understanding of how practitioners navigate such tensions in ways that enable them to sustain their commitment to craft in the face of growing technological affordances and changing meanings. We explore this issue by studying a community of 500+ lacemakers in rural Poland who have continued their craft across generations. We find that craft resilience depends on the ability of practitioners to nurture meaningful craft livelihoods over time. Such livelihoods depend on the attachment of multiplex meanings to craft practice, which is sustained by 2 mechanisms: protecting community ownership over craft practice and cultivating respect for craft practice. Our study adds to the growing literature on craft by drawing attention to its inherent fragility in post-industrial society and by theorising how craft practices are made resilient through the protection of ‘purity’ and adaptation to changing conditions. We point to avenues for further cross-fertilisation between the craft and practice literature.