Dr Duncan Watson

Biography

Duncan, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, is primarily a labour economist. Whilst retaining his commitment to this area of expertise, much of his recent research has been considerably less conventional in form. Over the past few years he has been preoccupied with transgressing a few ‘economic borderlines’, and he has experimented with the application of labour theory to increasingly diverse topics, deemed by many to be non-traditional and lying outside the accepted boundaries of the discipline. Examples of current research projects that reflect this more eclectic and cross-disciplinary approach include the linking of economic psychology to the modelling of housing demand, the application of firm organisation theory to skill shortages, assessing the impact of military expenditure on labour demand and the investigation of the importance of labour market inefficiency on financial sector costs. Duncan is active in pedagogical research into the student experience and has published the following teaching related output for the Economics profession: "Economics is the study of scarcity: Avoiding the Various Means to Disengage Student Interest..." (An Economics Network Case Study into an Applied Economics module, providing a toolkit which demonstrates how a curriculum can be designed which further enhances the student experience); "Assessment Design and Methods" (A chapter for the Economic Network's Handbook for Economics Lecturers which considers alternative assessment methods - seminar assessments, reflective learning exercises, project-based learning, group assessment, mentoring, peer group support, multi-stage dissertation-based assessment, online discussion boards, alternatives to traditional essays- that are used to further facilitate the upskilling of students).

Research Interest

Current Research Projects: Economics of Crime, Pension Provision, Home Ownership Pedagogical Analysis: Pluralism in Economics, Widening Participation