Professor Dakshina De Silva

My research focuses on Industrial Organization, Auctions, Bond Markets, Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, Networks, Regional and Urban Economics, and Applied Microeconomics.

The research on auctions analyses how bidding behaviour is affected by strategic interactions of firms and policy changes, whilst research on multi-unit auctions has investigated whether Treasury securities should be sold through uniform or discriminatory auction mechanisms and the effects of auction rules on financial market stability and volatility.

Some of my research on environmental economics examines strategic firm location in the context of environmental justice, while other studies examine how a board director's networks and past environmental performance affect her/his appointment to a board and firms' environmental performance. My research on urban economics and regional science has focused on the effects of university knowledge spillovers on high tech firm start-ups, geographic concentration and firm survival, agglomeration and firm growth, migration on regional wages, and spatial correlation on bidding behaviour in procurement auctions. Some of these research have been published in the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and the European Economic Review.

In interdisciplinary research with the Wind Science and Engineering Research Center at TTU (now the National Wind Institute), I have studied topics related to labour, natural hazards, and renewable and non-renewable energy economics. These projects have attracted federal and local funding. One of the resultant papers, entitled "Do Localities Benefit from Extraction of Local Natural Resources?" was awarded the IAEE's Energy Economics Education Foundation's "Best Paper" prize published in The Energy Journal in 2020. Further, I was the founder and am now a co-organiser of the annual Auctions, Competition, Regulation, and Public Policy Conference at Lancaster and was a co-organiser of the Network of Industrial Economists (UK) Winter Conference in Lancaster in December 2013.