Dr Adelina Gschwandtner

Adelina Gschwandtner was born in Bucharest, Romania. After a first degree in Economics at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, she moved to the University of Vienna, where she was awarded her PhD in 2002.  She subsequently worked at the University of Vienna until 2011, before moving to the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). She joined the University of Kent in September 2012.

Adelina's research interests in Vienna lay in the field of empirical Industrial Organization. Her two main research areas being Profit Persistence and Sunk Costs. More recently she has worked on the determinants of profit persistence in the European food sector, and plans to analyse the relationship between food and health. Her papers in this area have been published in Economic Inquiry, Applied Economics, The Manchester School, and The Review of Economics and Statistics.

After moving to Kent, Adelina has started to work in the areas of Agricultural Economics, Environmental Valuation and the Economics of Happiness. She has published work related to improving farming technologies in Africa, preferences towards Organic Food and the relationship between Lifestyle and Happiness. Her papers in this area have been published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, the European Review of Agricultural Economics and the Journal of Happiness Studies.

She is a member of the Microeconomics Research Group, the Centre for European Agri-Environmental Studies, and the Development Economics Research Centre.

Adelina's main research interests are in applied economics and her work is empirical. It includes work on profit persistence, sunk costs and their impact on firm size/industry dynamics, and agricultural economics. More recently however, Adelina has been analysing the consumer choice of organic food products and the relationship between nutrition and other lifestyle dimensions on happiness in the UK.  

Adelina's RePEc page is http://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pgs2.htm

Media coverage

• Get to know Adelina and watch 5 Minutes with Dr Adelina Gschwandtner!

• LSE: Benchmarking leads to a dynamic of constant growth in university leaders’ pay
• Mindfulness for Student Wellbeing
• Obesity and Personalized Medical Care in the UK
• Measuring and Mitigating Aversion to Climate-Smart Agriculture
• Gschwandtner study considers the consumption of fruit and vegetables and doing exercise – on happiness.  
• Taste and health benefits key reasons for buying organic food
• Consumers Buy Organic Food for Taste and Health Reasons, Not Ethics, Study Shows
• Organic & Natural Business magazine

• ECON5470: Industrial Economics
• ECON8400: Sustainable Economic Growth and Environmental Valuation
• ECON8470: Research Skills for Economics Dissertation
• ECON8471: Research Skills for Economics and Data Science
• ECON8850: Topics in Advanced Microeconomics
• ECON9981: Economics Dissertations
• ECON9982: Dissertation Economics Bangladesh: Brac & North South University

Adelina is interested in supervising PhD research on the following topics:

• Agricultural Economics
• Environmental Valuation
• Consumer valuation studies
• Economics of Happiness

Past students

• Christian Crentsil, completed 2018
• Cheul Jang, completed 2018
• Jose Eduardo Ribeiro, completed 2023

Administrative roles

• Director of Graduate Studies (Masters)
• Wellbeing Co-ordinator
• Member of School Strategic Management Group 
• MSc Chief Examiner