Inaugural Lecture of Professor Ija Trapeznikova

In a perfect world, if you wanted a job and a company wanted a worker, you would match instantly. In the real world, there are "search frictions" - it takes time, money, and luck to find each other. How do we make sure that people are able to find suitable employment, while companies can find qualified workers? In this lecture, Professor Ija Trapeznikova discusses how institutional structures and frictions in the labour market influence job creation, productivity, and wage inequality, with the focus on low-income countries where these constraints are more severe.

Ija earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Latvia, her Masters’s degree at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and her PhD at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Her PhD thesis, titled “Employment Adjustment and Labour Utilitization”, designs an economic model of firm and workers, where firms can choose to employ more workers or increase the hours of work of their existing employees. During her PhD, she spent two semesters at Aarhus University (Denmark) to apply her model to the Danish administrative data. Ija has been at Royal Holloway since 2010, being an integral part of the Department of Economics. She has served as a Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Economics, followed by a Director of PGR Education at the School of Law and Social Sciences. She continues to contribute to the PGR space in the College, representing Royal Holloway at the Management Board of our ESRC-funded DTPs (first SeNSS and now SEDarc). She works on the intersection of Macroeconomics and Labour Economics, using large administrative or household survey data and computational modelling to study the behaviour of individuals and firms, and it is affected by different policies. Her recent line of work looks at these questions in developing countries, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Admission is free, but booking is essential.