Dr Sean Brophy

My profile

Biography

Sean Brophy, a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan Business School with previous roles at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and as manager of the ERDF-funded Greater Manchester AI Foundry, is a microeconomist specializing in education, human capital and the labour market. Elected a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, his work has attracted attention from prominent media outlets, including The Financial Times, Times Higher Education and Press Association. He has also developed executive education programmes for leading firms such as Google, Twitter, and KPMG.

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.
Bertrand Russell

Projects

  • Is there an age effect? Perceived Financial Returns to Education: Evidence from the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, 2023 - Present 
  • Field of study and the subjective labour market outcomes of UK graduates, 2022 - Present 
  • The Value of ‘Home’: Estimates based on graduates’ decisions to migrate for employment, 2022 - Present
  • The Ethnic Degree Awards Gap and Intersectionality: 2022-2024
  • Ethnicity and Graduate Migration: An Identity Economics Approach, 2021-2024
  • Perception of Place: The Attraction and Retention of Graduates to Greater Manchester, 2017-2020

Teaching

Sean currently supervises doctoral students focused on the quantitative study of labour market outcomes and the ethical use of AI in recruitment and selection. 

He welcomes applications from prospective PhD students focused on: 

  • Higher education and work 
  • Human capital and employment 
  • Education and work inequalities
  • AI ethics and work

Research outputs