Code of Research Conduct

Managing and sustaining growth in African economies

Improvements in the sequential change-point detection schemes for finance

A bigger and better Course Collection for LSE Library!

• create new and additional study spaces to meet student demand and improve the quality and range of study spaces 

• enable growth in key areas of the Library's outstanding social science collection

• facilitate building works as part of LSE LIFE – a new academic, personal and professional development centre for all LSE taught students. LSE LIFE will be housed in a purpose built space on the ground floor of the Library and will be launched in Michaelmas Term 2016 with an integrated programme of workshops, training and support.

Accounts Payable Survey 2016 coming soon

The secrets to job satisfaction? Time and change

The paper shows that people’s satisfaction in a job gradually declines over the years – until they move to a new organisation, when they experience a boost. Then, the cycle of decline begins again.

However, as people get older, they become generally more satisfied with their working lives. According to the researchers, one reason for this is that older people are often better paid than their younger colleagues. Indeed, people can even experience higher job satisfaction in the same job if their pay increases. In addition, as workers age, they may also have more realistic expectations of work or have higher status jobs, which results in higher job satisfaction.
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Workplace stress can change our personalities

The research, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, found that workers who felt they were placed under excessive strain in their roles reported higher levels of neuroticism, becoming more worried and irritable, and became less extroverted, showing signs of shyness and speaking less often.

Conversely, the study showed that workers who experienced greater control within their jobs reported increases in personality traits like cooperation and warmth, alongside creativity and imagination.
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LSE study shows better teachers mean happier and higher-achieving pupils

Dr Fleche analysed ALSPAC data from a study of 10,000 children growing up in the Bristol area who were tracked from birth until they turned 21.

Children taught by teachers in the top 10 per cent led not just to better test results but also a 20 per cent improvement in happiness and emotional wellbeing.
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Gains in life expectancy hide premature deaths among white High School Graduates

The research, published in the journal Demography, looked at the distribution of age of death by educational attainment. It found that college-educated Americans not only live longer than their less educated counterparts, on average, but their deaths tend to be concentrated at particularly old ages. By contrast, high school-educated Americans – particularly whites – have experienced increasing variability in age at death since 1990 due to a rise in premature deaths.
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New book throws light on university-educated Islamist extremists

The finding is published in a new book recently launched at LSE, Engineers of Jihad.

The book, which relies on a study of over 800 members of violent Islamist groups, challenges a widely-held view that many terrorists are “poor, ignorant and have nothing to lose,” according to its authors, LSE academic Dr Steffen Hertog and European University Institute Professor Diego Gambetta.
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Top tips


Nine ways research gets into Parliament
Sarah Foxen, PhD Candidate in French Linguistics, University of Exeter shares nine specific ways research currently gets into Parliament and provides some helpful links on where to start to get more involved. Read the full article on The Impact Blog. 

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60 second interview

Nigel Rogers is centre manager for the Centre for Economic Performance and manager of the LSE Research Laboratory, a unique institution bringing together LSE's leading research centres in economics, finance, industrial relations, social policy and demography to work on the major social and economic policy issues of our time. 
 
Tell us about your experience since joining LSE in 1984. What was your first role here?
I joined LSE as the manager of the Department of Economics in 1984 except in those days you were called an administrative secretary. I spent the first three weeks throwing away 20 years' worth of paperwork that was clogging up the 14 filing cabinets and cupboards in the room, including annals of the Department of Economics' bridge club. I was kept fit in those pre-email days running up the six floors of the St. Clements building trying to arrange things with the 12 admin staff and 60 academics in the department – finding staff in their rooms gave me a rare sense of achievement.
 
As centre manager for the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), could you tell us when you joined CEP and about your role managing the Centre?
After a brief four year period away from LSE working with architects, builders and planners at the Bartlett School, UCL, I re-joined LSE in 1990 to help Richard Layard set up the new Centre for Economic Performance - the first of the large interdisciplinary social science research centres. Since then we’ve added many centres, which grew out of or work with the CEP (Spatial Economics, Economics of Education, Centre for Vocational Education Research, two ESRC “What Works” Centres).
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The job then, as now, involved raising research money and then justifying being given it by demonstrating how our research had affected the real world, a bit disconcerting when our funders asked us to report on our impact after the first month of operating. The mix of keeping tabs on a £5m budget, running huge events, including a conference for finance ministers of the former Soviet republics with 14 simultaneous translation booths, getting social psychologists and economists to work together on joint projects, setting up a policy advice centre in Moscow and paying staff there by sending cash over in the director’s socks, kept us all highly entertained. I have found working in a centre satisfying in that there is always a strong team spirit, a feeling of working together towards a worthwhile aim.

You look after CEP's grant applications and research projects. What advice or best practice would you like to share with fellow centre managers and staff looking after externally funded grants? 
In managing grants you’ve got to know the detail but be able to have a broad enough overview to answer questions sprung on you without notice by researchers who are surprisingly uninterested in the details of the budgets they’ve spent so much time in raising. Always be ready to answer broad-brush questions fired at you without warning like “Can I afford a conference for 50 people with five US speakers, and to hire three researchers for three years, two years from now?”.
 
Always present the highest distillation of the figures or the arguments you can in order to help others make a decision - I know of only one academic, out of hundreds, interested in perusing spreadsheets or regulations. Only bother researchers for feedback on their work and impact in a regular cyclical way and not too often – make it easy for them to respond (with model answers, tick lists) and never present them with a blank sheet of paper. Make sure that they know when you are going to contact them for help, and that when you do, you mean business and will pursue them for it.

If you’re always on at them to collect information or providing them with information, you’ll be ignored by most. You should assume that if the written word, despite the fact we work in a university, contains a single item of administrative content, it will be filtered out of consciousness.
 
As for applying for grants or justifying our research to funders, much of the job involves translating the “science” in the abstracts which researchers are used to writing for journal papers, into chunks of non-technical prose which non-scientists, but funders who hold the purse strings, will understand. In applications for money, researchers need to forcibly point out why their work is interesting/new/fills a gap/ and is relevant to big policy or real world questions. As well as the maxim of being able to tell a non-expert what you’re working on in the space of a ride to the 6^th floor in the lift, every application should be written assuming that its audience will yawningly ask the question “SO WHAT?”
 
You were winner of the Kemble Chopin piano competition, 2009 and finalist in the Classic FM/Piano Magazine Amateur competition 2005. In addition you have recorded late Sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert and Bach's Goldberg Variations. Tell us a bit more about your musical talents. 
Often when asked by members of staff visiting the centre after 15 years “God what are you still doing here?” I have to ask myself the same question. As well as the work always changing, great colleagues, the fact you are left alone to develop your job and work, and the amazingly liberal flexible attitude of LSE, the key to my staying has been my passion for music and the fact that I practise the piano 20 hours a week. The different worlds of work and music help me enjoy both of them more. In our fascination for MRI scans’ ability to light up differently according to whether we’re happy or sad, I’ve often imagined wiring myself up to electrodes whilst playing a Bach prelude and fugue every morning to demonstrate the happiness effect – forget childhood heroes, my favourite book, etc. etc., the music of Bach lifts me into another floating world where I forget who I am whilst I become entwined with the multiple lines of his music and yet want to dance at the same time. It’s just enough each morning to prepare me for the world of performance indicators, impact statements and making the figures add up.
 
I make a serious recording hiring a concert hall and decent Steinway every 10 years to check that I’m still alive and last year recorded the last Schubert Sonata (D960), the 4th Chopin Ballade and the Bach 5th French Suite. I argue that whilst a painter or sculptor have lasting visual creations to express their inner life, musicians have a period of two weeks max to perform a piece to a really high standard after practising for several months before things start to deteriorate: so recording for me is a way of having a less transitory record of my progress. I’m proudest of the Goldberg Variations I recorded in 1995 and anyone interested (shameless advertising) should Google “Nigel Rogers Goldberg” to have a listen.
 
Performing in concerts and competitions is helpful in making me practise with an aim, but the experience of dealing with nerves and trembling hands gets worse, not better, as I get older. I’ve found that I play best having been immersed for hours in some excruciatingly bureaucratic exercise for work and then being let loose on the piano. I have yet to use this as a method of optimising my performance in concerts though!
 
If you could give your younger self some advice, what would it be? 
Lighten up and don’t take things personally.
 
If you could do it all again, what alternative career would you have chosen? 
I’d like to have been an editor (but with a publisher that paid properly)  – with no creative writing skills myself, I nevertheless (think I) know what’s good writing and what’s not and have spent a lot of time helping translate people’s writing for other audiences or making suggestions as to how to improve it.