What will a post COVID-19 world look like? Can you predict when the economy will recover? How will we adapt to overcome the challenges posed by pandemic uncertainty? Economics isn’t optional to study right now: it’s vital to our future well-being in a post COVID-19 world. The skills you learn at Essex will be in high demand from employers in the coming years.

At Essex we have a unique strength in public policy measures to stimulate and manage the economy, including the behavioural techniques to get messages across. You could combine study of health economics with public economics and development economics to get a broad view of how one can respond to a threat such as COVID-19, balancing home and global needs.

Economic recovery is probably one the most pressing and urgent challenges right now and studying an economics degree gives you the unique tools to take on this challenge, find a solution, and improve well-being.

At Essex we push the frontiers of accepted wisdom, critically examining the decisions of individuals, the strategies of firms, and the policies of governments to understand and challenge the standard paradigms of economics. In our popular flagship masters course you will develop the expert research mind-set required for a high-profile job in finance or business.

You gain a rigorous training in the key areas of economics through studying the following topics:

• Strategic behaviour, public choice and general equilibrium
• Modern theory and methods with application to policy
• Optimisation theory, formal economic arguments, and the role of equilibrium
• Econometric methods

We are 4th in UK for research power in economics and econometrics (Times Higher Education research power measure, Research Excellence Framework 2021). Much of this world-class research is related to policy, and we have particular strengths in the areas of:

• Game theory and strategic interactions
• Theoretical and applied econometrics
• Labour economics