David Frayman

David Frayman is a PhD student at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).

David Frayman is a PhD candidate working with Professor Mariana Mazzucato and Dr Antonio Andreoni on the effects of public loans supporting private investment. His PhD evaluates a large programme of European Investment Bank financing supported under the EU’s Juncker Plan (the European Fund for Strategic Investments). This has collected a unique dataset on the investments and recipients financed and leverages a difference-in-differences causal identification strategy to detect effects on firm investment, growth and innovation. His research is in collaboration with the Economics Department of the European Investment Bank where he spent a short period as a visiting researcher. He was also a visiting student in 2020-2021 on the taught PhD programme in Economics at the Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa.

Prior to his PhD, David studied development economics, obtaining a Research Master’s from the University of Amsterdam. For his thesis, he spent one year researching the effects of labour-saving technological change on manufacturing employment in the Philippines. This showed that past employment deindustrialisation was not the result of automation and that widely cited models predicting future automation overestimate job losses because they fail to account for the heterogeneous technological capabilities and cost incentives of firms.

In 2019, he was a Research Fellow on a Ford Foundation funded project at UCL on the evolution of labour market structure and its relationship to public policy and innovation, with reference to the economies of the UK, US, Germany and France. He reported his findings to the Policy Director of the AFL-CIO. He has also been a researcher on the PELICAN project (Practice-based Learning in Cities for Climate Action), funded by the European Institute of Technology’s Climate-KIC, where he worked on the economic policy issues raised by a green transition.

His research interests include causal inference, finance and growth, financial constraints, financial and monetary policy, innovation, and economic history. He would welcome contact regarding any of the above at d.frayman@ucl.ac.uk and can be followed on Twitter: @davidfrayman.