Professor Peter Wright

Department of Economics

Professor of Economics

Peter Wright profile
Profile picture of Peter Wright profile
p.wright@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 3413

Full contact details

Professor Peter Wright
Department of Economics
Room 507
9 Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 4DT
Profile

Peter graduated from the University of Bristol in 1989 and gained his MA and PhD from the University of Warwick. He previously worked at the University of Nottingham as lecturer, senior lecturer and then Reader in Labour Economics. At Nottingham he was one of the co-founders of the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy (GEP) and, from 2002 to 2010, he was the Programme Co-ordinator of the Globalisation and Labour Market (GLM) Programme. He remains a GEP external fellow.

Peter has completed research projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and has been involved in advisory reports for Deutsche Bank, the (former) Department for Trade and Industry, UK Trade and Investment and the European Commission. Peter joined the Department in September 2010 as Professor of Economics and became Head of Department in 2015.

Research interests

Peter's research interests lie primarily in the area of labour market adjustment, and he has worked in both open and closed economy frameworks. His work has been both theoretical and applied. Examples of his work include: an examination of the wage and employment effects of merger; corporate governance reforms and executive compensation determination; the unemployment and income consequences for individuals of firm closure.

He is particularly interested in supervising doctoral work using matched employer-employee data.

Publications

Journal articles

Teaching activities

My approach to teaching is to examine issues of which students may already have experience or opinions: education, the decision to work, unemployment and then to attempt to integrate theoretical modelling and empirical evidence in order to address questions of policy. Where possible I seek to link the topics taught to my research. I would like students to think critically about what they are taught and engage with the process of academic research.