I am an applied economist. My work centres on causal inference: quasi-experimental methods applied to large-scale administrative data to estimate the effects of economic and social policy on health, work and inequality.
Three threads run through my research. The first is the workforce: health care workforce planning, the dynamics of population ageing and morbidity and their implications for health care labour supply, and the supply of formal and informal care. The second is incentives: how providers of public services respond to the terms of their contracts, including national pay-for-performance schemes and their unintended consequences. The third is regional policy: I currently lead the synthetic control evaluation of Scotland's community wealth building programme (CoWBELLs, NIHR), and my earlier research includes the needs-based formula adopted as the basis for target allocations of England's public health grant from 2016.
I trained in economics at Keele and Manchester, and have worked at the Manchester Centre for Health Economics, in private-sector consultancy, and, since 2022, at Lancaster University, where I am co-Director of Research in the Division of Health Research. I sit on the NIHR Public Health Research Programme Funding Committee.
News
- 2026Co-lead of the drug and alcohol research theme of the new £11m NIHR Mental Health Research Group.
- 2026CodeChella causal inference workshop (Mixtape Sessions, Madrid): recent developments in difference-in-differences methods and AI-assisted research workflows.
- 2025CoWBELLs under way: a £1.6m NIHR evaluation of community wealth building in Scotland; I lead the quantitative (synthetic control) work package.
Contact
Email: t.mason5@lancaster.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0003-3135-0364
University profile: Lancaster University