Behavioural economics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in behavioural economics began in the second year of my Economics degree, when a microeconomics problem set asked us to assume that consumers correctly discount future costs. That week I was on the phone at the credit union where I work part-time, talking to a member who had taken out a second loan to cover the repayments on the first. She could explain her own situation more clearly than any model I had studied, and she was not confused about the arithmetic. What the standard framework missed was the sequence in which choices had arrived, and how little slack she had to think about any of them.

I followed that interest deliberately. I chose modules in behavioural and experimental economics and in applied econometrics, and read Thaler's Misbehaving alongside Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which helped me see present bias and loss aversion as testable claims rather than labels. Mullainathan and Shafir's Scarcity was useful in a different way: it pushed me to think about cognitive load as a scarce resource rather than treating poor decisions as evidence of poor preferences. I was careful, though, to take the methodological criticism seriously, particularly debates about replication and effect sizes in priming research, and about whether small framing effects survive outside the laboratory. That scepticism is part of what attracts me to the field.

My dissertation was a modest test of default effects. With my supervisor's guidance and departmental ethics approval, I ran a paper-based hypothetical savings task with 94 students recruited through course notice boards, varying whether a monthly contribution was pre-ticked or left blank, and collecting a short measure of financial confidence. Take-up was higher in the default condition, but the confidence interval was wide and the sample was unrepresentative in obvious ways. Writing up honestly what I could and could not conclude taught me more than a clean result would have. I did the analysis in R and learned to pre-specify my main comparison after realising, during piloting, how tempting it was to reinterpret the data afterwards.

My work and home responsibilities have shaped how I think about the subject. At the credit union I handle arrears calls and explain repayment options; I have seen how much difference it makes when information is delivered at the moment a decision is actually being made rather than in a letter weeks earlier. At the weekly advice drop-in I volunteer at, I mostly help people fill in forms and find the right phone number, which is unglamorous and has made me wary of the idea that small design changes can substitute for adequate income. At home I share responsibility for my younger brother, who has additional learning needs, and coordinating his appointments and school meetings has made me a better organiser and considerably more patient with slow institutional processes.

From a master's I want stronger technical foundations: structural estimation, experimental design and causal inference at a level that would let me run and evaluate field studies rather than only read them. I would like to write a dissertation on how repayment reminders and framing affect arrears outcomes in small mutual lenders, a setting that is under-studied compared with large banks and one I understand from the inside. Afterwards I hope to work in applied research, either in a policy team or a consumer finance regulator, where careful evidence about ordinary financial decisions is genuinely used.

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