Sweta Pramanick

Sweta Pramanick (MSc, Antwerp) is a PhD student in financial history at Queen's. Her research focuses on understanding how productivity and the integration of new innovative technologies have shaped the UK economy during the twentieth century. (Supervised by Philip Fliers and John Turner)

PhD project title: Tackling Productivity Questions: A Long-Run Perspective

The objective of this PhD project is to understand how firms integrate new innovative technologies in both products and processes. The candidate will examine the evolution and impact of advanced manufacturing capabilities on productivity and regional development by employing an interdisciplinary approach which includes history, economics, politics and finance. Using history as their “laboratory”, the candidate will look at this issue from different perspectives: (a) investigating the differences in productivity and technology in manufacturing between Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the various regions of England; (b) investigating the impact of macroeconomic and monetary policy on productivity and the transmission of technology across regions; and (c) investigating the importance of institutions in the process of knowledge creation, corporate productivity and advanced manufacturing capabilities.

This project sets out to create a novel database of labour and manufacturing statistics for UK firms between 1900 and 2020. These data allow us to track how productivity and the integration of new technologies shaped the UK economy. Insights from this project may have important policy implications; it will aid policymakers in understanding the criteria for the successful integration of new technologies in existing production processes. For example, Kotha and Swamidass (2000) show firms that exhibit a better strategic fit with advanced manufacturing technologies also perform better. However, most evidence presented on advanced manufacturing and firm-level productivity is void of a long-run perspective and focuses solely on a very particular subset of manufacturers. Robust policy measures can only be gleaned from employing a long-run perspective that reveals the root cause of the significant premium low productivity firms earn yet make them vulnerable to economy-wide shocks. By covering multiple business cycles, policy implications can be generated on how best to protect “vital industries”.

• UK Productivity
• Corporate Finance
• Asset Pricing
• Economic History
• Financial Econometrics

• MSc. Finance (with distinction) (Antwerp Management School, University of Antwerp)
• B.Tech (Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology)