Panka Bencsik, a final-year PhD student in Economics, recently became one of 16 PhD candidates selected to participate at this year’s Western Economic Association International (WEAI) Graduate Student Workshop. In doing so, she became the first participant nominated by an institution outside North America to be selected in the event’s 10-year history.

The workshop, due to take place in Vancouver from 26 to 30 June 2018 as part of WEAI’s 93^rd Annual Conference, offers participants hands-on experience in job-market paper presentation and interviewing skills.

As part of a group focused on labour market issues and crime, Panka will give a 50- to 60-minute presentation of her paper Nowcasting Crime Externalities: the Effect of Crime and of Perceived Crime on Mental Wellbeing and Behaviour to three students and a faculty advisor before up to 30 minutes of questions and discussion.

In this paper, Panka moves forward in the intersection of health and crime economics, which she has already explored in her paper The Non-Financial Costs of Violent Public Disturbances: Emotional Responses to the 2011 Riots in England.

Panka, who recently returned from a Fulbright Scholarship at the world’s largest think tank, The Brookings Institution in Washington DC, said: “The opportunity to show my work and get specialised feedback on it, as well as gaining experience of mock interviews, will be invaluable as I prepare to enter the job market.

"It will be great to see some new work by fellow economists working with similarly unconventional datasets or with Big Data, and I am looking forward to reconnecting with colleagues from the US.”

Panka is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics whose research is focused primarily on the economics of crime and health economics. Her thesis Essays on the Mental Health Effect of Crime and of Pivotal Life Changes is due to be completed at the end of 2018.