Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay

Professor of Economics, University of Birmingham
Siddhartha is an internationally recognised economist in the field of political economy and public policy. He is the recipient of the Duncan Black prize awarded by the Public Choice Society for his work on the electoral incentives of prosecutors with Bryan McCannon. His work on political coalitions has been published in internationally leading journals and has been widely cited by leading scholars in the field. His papers are on the reading list of a number of courses in political economy in reputed universities. He has a particular interest in the economics of crime and economic evaluation of policy. His research interests in this area includes game theoretic modelling of criminal behaviour, econometric (statistical) analysis of factors determining crime, cost benefit analysis of alternate interventions, and the impact of initiatives such as citizen reporting. He has published several papers in reputed journals in this area as well and has been cited in both academic papers as well as policy reports, including the Official National Statistics. He is well versed in the methodological tools required to do analysis of the economic efficiency of various interventions and developed a course at the PG level in this area. He has also given short training sessions on economic evaluation to police and other practitioners.

His work on crime has been featured widely in the media and he has been interviewed by the Economist. He has links with think tanks such as Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and CIVITAS. Along with regularly speaking in academic seminars, he also participates in high profile public engagement activities such as addressing a panel discussion organised by the Criminal Justice Alliance on ‘Why crime rates are falling’ chaired by Mark Eaton.

Siddhartha is the lead economist on a number of externally funded projects that includes the Police Knowledge Fund (jointly funded by HEFCE and the Home office via the College of Policing) and another funded by Norfolk and Suffolk constabulary (see Recent Grants under Research). He is the director of cross disciplinary the Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing