Dr Su-Min Lee is a Principal Consultant at London Economics, working across several sectors with a particular focus on the economics of education, labour markets, and the application of data science to economics and public policy.

Su-Min leads work for the Department for Education understanding trends and the impact of government policy within the childcare sector. He manages the analysis of the department’s annual Survey of Childcare and Early Years Providers. The reports he has written for the department cover aspects of the sector ranging from the cost of childcare to workforce turnover. In addition, he is leading the department’s evaluation of the National Wraparound Childcare Programme, which estimates the impact of the programme on parental labour market outcomes.

Su-Min uses a range of complex techniques in the quantitative analysis he undertakes. This includes econometric techniques, such as for the Department for Business and Trade in understanding the impact of international investment agreements on UK overseas direct investment and estimating the impact of post-16 education on UK productivity for the Department for Education. He also has used a range of machine-learning methods for clients such as the Low Pay Commission (identifying key types of minimum wage workers) and the UK Space Agency (identifying key types of space-related companies).

He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge, following an MPhil and BA in Economics from the same university. His doctoral thesis investigated economic and political inequalities, undertaking a wide range of empirical microeconomic methods (using Excel, STATA, and R) and machine-learning techniques, such as topic modelling of text data. Su-Min also has previous experience as a Teaching Fellow in microeconomics at Cambridge during his doctoral studies and was awarded ‘Best Performance as a Supervisor’ on several occasions.