Development Studies PhD student Biagio Rosso has been awarded a £5,000 research grant by King’s College London for his project in Economics and Quantitative Modelling.

The grant is one of two £5,000 research grants offered by King’s College in partnership with the ETERON Institute for Research and Social Change for developing a research project on the nexus between industrial policy and taxation.

The grant is part of a research initiative titled Reclaiming Europe’s Industrial Policy Through Just Taxation and Innovation which "seeks to advance knowledge on the intersection of industrial policy and fair taxation". Biagio will be working alongside principal investigator Dr Georgios Samaras at the King’s College School of Government and Policy Institute, developing the objective and methodologies of this research initiative.

Biagio specialises in macroeconomics and development economics, with a particular interest in the study of macroeconomic dynamics. He is also interested in the transmission and design of monetary and fiscal policy in relation to the features of the institutional environment of developing economies. His work on such topics aims towards quantitative theory building through DSGE modelling, including Heterogenous Agents Models, and associated numerical-computational techniques. 

His doctoral research, supervised by Professor Shailaja Fennell, consists of a series of applied and methodological essays sharing a common focus on the key aspects of the institutional organisation of developing economies, marking a departure from the institutional environment characterising advanced economies and their modelling. 

Biagio has also received a prestigious 2025 PhD Internship at the Bank of England, Monetary Policy Division, to work on a project in frontier DSGE and HANK modelling, drawing from his doctoral research on macroeconomics and development.

Prior to his PhD, Biagio completed an MPhil with Distinction at the Centre of Development Studies, focusing his paper choices on developing economics and econometrics, and his undergraduate studies at King’s College London. He is also a member of the UK Society of Professional Economists (SPE) and the Post-Keynesian Economics Society (PKES), and was appointed a visiting researcher at the department of economics at IIT Bombay for Summer 2024. Beyond his main research, Biagio has been involved in teaching and supervisions on microeconomics, macroeconomics, and the econometrics workshop series at CDS.

His research is fully funded by the Cambridge Trust in partnership with Corpus, through the award of a Cambridge International Scholarship and the Corpus Christopher Colclough Studentship for graduate studies in Development Economics. 

Reflecting on his PhD journey so far, Biagio said: "None of this would have been possible without the Christopher Colclough PhD studentship. As a first-generation college student from a working-class background, a doctoral degree in Cambridge was well beyond financial feasibility. To this date, I vividly remember how - despite having been made an offer for a place on the PhD programme - prior to receiving the award from the Cambridge Trust in partnership with Corpus Christi College, eventually taking up the place had seemed a very remote, intangible possibility.  I am certain that the progress achieved to date would not have been possible without the financial relief provided by the studentship."