Conor McCaffrey
Conor works at Bruegel as a Research assistant. He studied Philosophy, Political Science, Economics and Sociology in Trinity College Dublin for his undergraduate degree, where he specialised in Economics and studied in Tilburg University for a semester. He also holds an MA in Economics from the Vancouver School of Economics in the University of British Columbia, Canada, and his thesis considered the impact of welfare reforms on educational outcomes in the UK.
Prior to completing his Master’s degree, Conor completed a traineeship in the European Parliament, where much of his work was focused on the Special Committee on Foreign Interference in European Democracies. He also worked as an intern in the Institute for International and European Affairs in Dublin, and held roles as both a Research Assistant and a Teaching Assistant over the course of his Master’s degree. He is particularly interested in labour and public economics.
Conor is a native English and Irish speaker.
Featured work
Emerging countries have replaced most of Russia’s lost trade with advanced economies
Russian trade overall seems to have suffered little from sanctions; meanwhile, medicine and food trade continues with sanctioning countries
Russian foreign trade tracker
Inflation inequality in the European Union and its drivers
Making industrial policy work: a case study on the European Battery Alliance Academy
Efforts to address skilled-labour shortages in the battery sector can provide lessons to other areas of EU industrial policy.
What will it cost the European Union to pay its economic recovery debt?
Servicing the EU debt until 2058 seems feasible, despite increased borrowing costs, but member countries must make choices about budget funding
An estimate of the European Union’s long-term borrowing cost bill
The rising cost of European Union borrowing and what to do about it
Interest rates on the EU debt have risen substantially since 2022: what are the main drivers and implications and what to do about it?
The ECB as part of an imperfect architecture
Does inflation hit the poor hardest everywhere?
Low-income households suffer most from high inflation, but in some European Union countries the inflation burden is felt more equally than others.