Mihaela-Claudia Pop

Mihaela is a DPhil candidate in International Development at Jesus College, University of Oxford, supervised by Prof Xiaolan Fu. Her doctoral research examines the relationship between (digital) financial inclusion and income composition inequality, which refers to differences in the shares of labour and capital income along the income distribution. Her research focuses on European countries and regions over the past two decades, using EU-SILC microdata and applied econometrics to generate policy-relevant evidence. 

At Oxford, she has taught Quantitative Methods seminars for the MPhil in Development Studies, with hands-on practice in Stata. She is also a PGTA in Development, Technology, and Innovation Policy at University College London STEaPP. Her applied research spans various projects: at the Global Priorities Institute, she contributed to Python-based web scraping and data preparation to build village-level datasets that informed the design of a randomised controlled trial on development decision-making; at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, she worked on regional inequality (analysing large-scale income microdata) and co-authored a Regional Studies article on the UK ‘Levelling Up’ agenda; at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, she conducted qualitative coding and a bibliometric review on digital sustainability; and at the School of Geography and the Environment, she contributed to research on sustainable energy systems and water infrastructure investment pipelines. She is an ONS-accredited Safe Researcher and has previously worked as a freelance editor.

Before her doctorate, Mihaela earned an MA in Business Economics (Distinction) from University College London and a BA in Accounting from Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania. She received the Coopers Scholarship for Eastern European master’s students from Goodenough College London and Jesus College’s Charles Green and Norman Ellis Funds to support a visiting PhD term at the National University of Singapore. Besides her doctoral research, she co-authored a study on attitudes towards wealth inequality, which is currently under review. She welcomes conversations on financial inclusion, FinTech, inequality, and opportunities for research collaboration.