Dr Mark Fransham

Mark is a prize-winning researcher, ESRC grant holder and award-winning teacher with interests in the geography of poverty and inequality, social security, housing and demography. He teaches quantitative methods for the MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention & Policy Evaluation, convenes the Methods Hub for DPhil students and supervises students on both our MSc courses.

Mark is a quantitative social scientist with expertise in administrative data, longitudinal analysis, causal inference and data visualisation, experienced in working in multidisciplinary and international environments. He became an academic researcher in 2018 after 13 years working in public policy and intervention research, primarily in local government. Mark is currently co-leading a £1.2 million ESRC-funded international programme of comparative research into spatial income inequality in North America and Europe, the “Linking National and Regional Inequality” project. With co-authors at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute he has investigated how political and social polarisation is experienced in local communities, a mixed methods project resulting in a paper that won the 2022 SAGE Prize for Innovation / Excellence in Sociology. His work on public policy includes two papers on the impact of the UK’s benefit cap on mental health and employment outcomes, and a critique of the Levelling Up strategy for reducing geographic inequalities.

Mark has been an advisor to the Office for National Statistics for ten years, currently on the UK Population Theme Advisory Board and the Migration Statistics Expert Group. He is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics & Political Science, and a Fellow of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics.

Research interests
  • Geographic economic inequalities:
    • Measurement, causes and consequences
    • Social and economic policy aimed at reducing spatial inequality
    • The differential spatial impact of ‘place blind’ policy
  • Poverty, housing and social security
  • Population geography, official demographic methods and their use in policymaking
  • Quantitative methods for social science
Publications
Supervision
  • MSc in Comparative Social Policy
  • MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention & Policy Evaluation
  • DPhil in Social Policy
  • DPhil in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation