Cahal Moran

Dr Cahal Moran is a behavioural economist who is interested in understanding the impact that behavioural heuristics and biases have on our decisions in the real world. In practice, this means looking at household datasets to try and tease out the various nuances and asymmetries created by the quirks of our behaviour. Cahal is especially interested in the economic effects of these behavioural quirks, such as their consequences for earnings and savings.

Since his PhD, Cahal has expanded his research to look at the impact of different biases on the behaviour of different groups. For example, he is currently working on a project which investigates the impact of choice overload on charitable giving among committed philanthropists, and preliminary results suggest that more choice actually encourages donations, which is contrary to choice overload. Joint work with Dr Ganga Shreedhar from PBS shows that the UK Government's much-vaunted High Speed Rail 2 policy likely resulted from overly optimistic cost-benefit analysis.

Cahal is also a passionate advocate of economic pluralism and has long been a member of the student-led campaign Rethinking Economics. His book The Econocracy summarises their argument for pluralism and the importance of economic ideas in contemporary society. Cahal's upcoming book Why We’re Getting Poorer analyses and explains issues such as inequality and cost of living crisis from a pluralist perspective. Finally, Cahal's YouTube channel Unlearning Economics provides similar commentary on things that interest him.