Gregor Semieniuk

Biography

Dr Gregor Semieniuk is a Lecturer in Economics at SOAS, University of London, and the Economics Department's Undergraduate Admissions Tutor. Gregor is also currently Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL and Associate Research Faculty at the Science Policy Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. Before joining SOAS, he was based at SPRU and studied the financing of technical change and innovation in the renewable energy industry as a Research Fellow on the Horizon 2020 project DOLFINS - Distributed Global Financial Systems for Society. A Foreign Fulbright Fellow, Gregor completed his PhD in economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where part of his research informed the modelling of energy in aggregate economic growth for the INET-funded project Growth, Distribution and Stability.

Research Interest

Gregor’s research focuses on questions of economic growth, innovation, and distribution with a particular focus on energy in economic activity. Currently he works on three projects. First, through the lens of competing theories of economic growth, he continues his PhD thesis work to characterise the role of energy in aggregate and sectoral technical change. Questions about decoupling economic growth from energy use, and consequences for the (functional) income distribution of changes in the energy price, eg through carbon taxes are examined. In the second project, he studies the rate and direction of investment in low-carbon energy. Harnessing increasing availability of transaction and organisation-level data for the renewable energy sector, this research interrogates both the determinants of financing for renewable energy deployment finance by distinguishing various sources of finance, and how profitable these investments are for companies engaged in the sector. Thirdly, Gregor reconsiders measures of the inequality in the personal distribution of economic resources, by inquiring how they can reflect the concern with `absolute' and other context-dependent inequalities.