Ioannis Papadakis

Postdoctoral Research Fellow 

RESEARCH   /   CV   /   TEACHING

Welcome!  I am a research fellow at the University of Sussex's Economics Department and a researcher at the CITP. In 2023, I received a PhD in economics from Queen Mary University of London. Before coming to London, I received an M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Warwick. My research revolves around macro and labour economics. I study technical change and globalization, with an emphasis on wage inequality and economic performance. Among other positions, I have been fortunate to be a research assistant at the CEP's Growth Programme and a guest teacher at the LSE.

Latest news – since November 15th 2022:

Research Spotlight
Technical Change from the Top: The Role of Director Nationality in Importing Robots

ABSTRACT:  How do directors impact robot adoption? Despite growing recognition of leadership in decision-making, we lack evidence on how corporate leaders shape technology. In this paper, I advance and corroborate empirically a hitherto undocumented mechanism: the role of nationality. The analysis benefits from corporate balance-sheet data with firm-director links and administrative trade data, where I can trace directors' nationality and identify robots.  Leveraging plausibly exogenous spatial variation in the supply of directors, I provide evidence of this mechanism for UK-based firms for the period 2009-2019. I show that firms with US-JP directors (top-2 non-EU robot exporting countries) have a significantly higher probability of importing non-EU robots. To probe this mechanism further, I turn to a battery of alternative specifications and an industry-level analysis that show consistent evidence. Further, the effect is concentrated in the manufacturing sector and confined mostly to machines. To guide the analysis and rationalise the evidence, I present a simple model with tasks-based production and heterogeneous in productivity firms that face a trade-off: to import robots and increase their productivity, they need to pay a premium to appoint foreign directors. Taken together, the findings highlight the role of directors' nationality in the diffusion of technologies produced abroad. Robots are a prime example as I document that their production is concentrated in a few countries making their sourcing and deployment more costly.

            Browse Through My Work

Here you can find a brief overview of my RESEARCH and TEACHING pages:

Publications       


Working Papers
Available upon request


Work in Progress


Prior to the PhD


Contribution Acknowledgements

Lectures
Queen Mary University of London

Tutorials
Queen Mary University of London

London School of Economics and Political Science


            References

Gino Gancia
Professor in Economics,
Queen Mary University of London
Phone: +44 207 882 8051
Email: g.gancia@qmul.ac.uk 

Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee
Reader in Economics
Queen Mary University of London
Phone: +44 20 7882 3997
Email: sylee.tim@qmul.ac.uk

Anna Raute
Senior Lecturer
Queen Mary University of London
Phone: +44 207 882 8051
Email: a.raute@qmul.ac.uk

Anna Valero
Senior Policy Fellow and
Deputy Director of the POID
Centre for Economic Performance –
London School of Economics
Phone: +44 20 7955 6975
Email: a.a.sivropoulos-valero@lse.ac.uk