Electricity price risk exposure and equity valuations in Europe

Key facts

• Opens: Thursday 12 March 2026
• Deadline: Thursday 30 April 2026
• Number of places: 1
• Duration: 36 months
• Funding: Home fee, International fee, Stipend

Eligibility

Candidates are required to have:

Strathclyde Business School is committed to supporting a diverse and inclusive postgraduate research population. We make decisions on entry by assessing the whole person and not relying solely on academic achievements. On that basis, please ensure that your application (via your CV and covering letter) can evidence your resourcefulness, commitment and resilience as demonstrated by broader professional and life experiences. This evidence should be centred on your ability to undertake and complete a PhD and contribute to a positive PhD community.

If English isn't your first language, you'll need an IELTS score of 6.5 (or an equivalent test) with no individual element below 5.5.

You must upload ONLY these documents to your application:

Please also indicate the title of the scholarship you are applying for in the Field of Study section of your application.

• a strong performance at master’s level where Economics, Finance, Statistics or Computer Science are the primary focus, with the expected completion date of the master’s degree no later than September 2026, along with at least 2.1 performance, or the equivalent, in a relevant undergraduate degree with a strong focus on Economics and Finance.
• an aptitude for coding and an interest in natural language processing, large language models, high-dimensional estimation, and computational methods. • Previous knowledge of programming in Python and MatLab is desirable for this project but not essential. • A demonstrable aptitude to undertake research and develop into an independent researcher.
• other relevant experience or skills will also be considered so please highlight these in your application.
• covering letter
• an updated curriculum vitae / résumé
• contact details of two academic referees, including email addresses
• academic transcripts, which must be certified copies
• evidence of English Language qualifications as required (if previously obtained)

Project Details

Electricity price volatility has become a major economic concern for European firms following recent energy-market disruptions and changes in power-market regulation. Sharp movements in electricity prices can affect firms’ costs, profitability, investment decisions and market valuations, yet there is still no widely used, timely, country-specific indicator that captures electricity-market risk and links it to firm-level outcomes. This creates an important gap for researchers, investors and policymakers seeking to understand how electricity-related uncertainty is transmitted through the wider economy.

The PhD project will see the appointed student work with the supervisory team to develop a new set of text-based electricity risk indicators for major European economies by applying large language models and natural language processing techniques to large collections of newspaper articles. The project will focus on leading newspapers in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, allowing the student to work with a rich multilingual dataset and to gain experience in building comparative cross-country measures of economic risk. The linguistic analysis of text is now widely used in Economics and Finance, but major challenges remain in detecting economically meaningful content across languages, classifying risk-related discussions accurately, and constructing interpretable and robust indicators from unstructured data.

An important contribution of this project is to address these challenges in the context of electricity markets, combining modern NLP tools with rigorous financial econometric methods. The project is particularly timely given the renewed geopolitical tensions affecting global energy markets, which have recently driven sharp movements in oil and gas prices and highlighted the vulnerability of European energy systems to external shocks. The student will assess whether the resulting electricity risk indices provide a meaningful measure of firms’ exposure to energy-related risk, and will then examine whether more exposed firms are valued differently by investors and earn different stock returns. The project therefore offers the opportunity to contribute to a highly topical research agenda at the intersection of energy economics, sustainable finance, text analytics and empirical asset pricing.

Funding details

Fully-funded scholarship for 3 years covers all university tuition fees (at UK level) and an annual tax-free stipend. International students are also eligible to apply, but they will need to find other funding sources to cover the difference between the home and international tuition fees. Exceptional international candidates may be provided funding for this difference.

While there is no funding in place for opportunities marked "unfunded", there are lots of different options to help you fund postgraduate research. Visit funding your postgraduate research for links to government grants, research councils funding and more, that could be available.

Dr Luigi Gifuni

Lecturer Economics

Professor Joseph Byrne

Economics

• Primary Supervisor: Dr Luigi Gifuni
• Additional Supervisor: Prof Joseph Byrne

Apply

Number of places: 1

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Economics

Programme: Economics

Contact us

luigi.gifuni@strath.ac.uk

Research areas