Biography

I have long been fascinated with the question of how societies achieve economic progress and how they determine the distribution of their resources. Volunteering for a year in Thailand after high school underscored to me how economic, political, and social inequalities are closely intertwined. I was able to delve into these topics as an undergraduate reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. I found economics to be a fascinating and useful perspective, because it enables us to interrogate socially important questions in a systematic and tractable way, and pursued these methods further in my Master's degree. As a PhD student, my objective is to research the Macroeconomics of Inequality: I want to analyse, firstly, what the distributive effects of fiscal and monetary policies are and whether we can employ them to help ensure a more equal distribution of resources without sacrificing growth. Secondly, I wish to investigate the extent to which changes in economic inequality over the past few decades shape recent phenomena such as slowing global growth. Through this research, I hope to contribute to the development of a macroeconomic perspective on the relationship between equality and efficiency. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity to research questions that to me seem profoundly important in times of high inequality and concerns about future prosperity, and I am thrilled to become part of the Gates Cambridge community!

Previous Education

University of Oxford

Links

https://www.lukasfreund.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukasfreund