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Deborah Drury

Managing Consultant

Deborah Drury is a Managing Consultant at Europe Economics. She joined the company in 2008 after completing her MSc in Economics at Warwick University. Prior to that, she worked in South Africa as a maths tutor and economics lecturer at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

Deborah Drury is a Managing Consultant at Europe Economics. She joined the company in 2008 after completing her MSc in Economics at Warwick University. Prior to that, she worked in South Africa as a maths tutor and economics lecturer at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

Deborah is an expert in the field of professional standards and regulation, incorporating risk analysis of professions, incentive design, and the role of policy intervention, for example in remuneration and training. Her experience includes work for the Financial Conduct Authority on the Individual Accountability regime and the Retail Distribution Review of financial advice, the Scottish Government on legal services, and a number of healthcare professional regulators.

Deborah also has a wealth of experience in economic impact assessment, advising private and public sector clients across a range of sectors such as financial services (both retail and wholesale markets), healthcare, digital economy, emissions, waste and recycling, and utilities. Her skills here include cost-benefit analysis, benchmarking, multi-criteria analysis, behavioural analysis, and desk research and fieldwork.

Deborah has a range of expertise in economic regulation, including incentive design, cost assessment, and price reviews. She has managed studies in the rail, water, and airport sectors for both regulators and companies.

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Professional regulation

Healthcare professionals are the driving force behind the delivery of high-quality care. Outcomes can be affected by external structures and systems as well as individuals’ training and incentives. Economic regulation is one tool that can assist healthcare regulators discern between contextual, clinical and competency risks facing a healthcare profession and its workforce, and develop targeted and cost-effective regulation and training. Our work includes:
  • A seminal assessment of the risks in domiciliary social care and options for revalidation and training to address these risks for the Department of Health, in the context of the Government’s White Paper on non-medical healthcare regulation.
  • Similar assessments of the risks and options for revalidation to address these risks for the General Optical Council; the General Dental Council; and the General Chiropractic Council.
  • A cost-benefit analysis of options for continuing professional development (CPD) for the General Dental Council.
  • Cost-benefit analysis of regulation models for optical businesses for the General Optical Council.

European Commission, DG CLIMA

We have conducted several studies for DG CLIMA relating to the European Union’s emissions trading system.   For example, we conducted a study looking at the impact of changes in trading activity on the price formation processes in the European carbon market, the access to the market for retail investors, which included also the access via exchange traded funds (ETFs), the hedging strategies of EU emissions trading system (ETS) compliance entities, and the role played by derivatives and financial entities in the EU ETS.

Danish Energy Regulator (Energistyrelsen)

We looked at how a benchmarking model used to help set price controls by the Energistyrelsen on DSOs might affect the Green Transition.  We looked at the challenges facing DSOs in the Green Transition and what behaviours should be incentivised.  We then looked at how the benchmarking model and wider regulatory framework might affect those incentives.  This included developing a number of worked examples to consider how the benchmarking model might affect incentives to invest in network expansion, faster connections or flexibility solutions. 

Zero Waste Scotland

Europe Economics was engaged by Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) to estimate how potential efficiency savings in water and energy are likely to be distributed across firms of different sizes and ownership structures in Scotland. The aim was to inform ZWS policy of where to target resource saving initiatives; in particular whether potential savings were sufficiently concentrated among SMEs to warrant specific effort among these.

We was also engaged by ZWS to estimate the costs and benefits of proposed market restrictions on specific single-use plastic products in Scotland and to analyse the impacts of the restrictions on competition, consumers and Scottish firms.

Citizens Advice UK

We were commissioned by Citizens Advice UK to investigate the mechanisms that could be used to limit or share the financial risk for energy bill payers in the context of highly anticipatory energy infrastructure investments in GB.

We developed a compendium of risk-allocation tools and, for each, we analysed: the suitability of the mechanism for different types of investments and projects; the extent (and the type) of risk allocated to consumers; the relative advantages and disadvantages of the tool; and how they affect the cost of capital. Each tool also included a case study of the tool being applied in practice.

Difference-in-difference

Relevant for measuring the impacts of changes in regimes/shocks. It uses observational study data of the same units across time and requires that the units (firms, individuals or countries) are divided into treatment and control groups. Difference-in-difference estimates the effect of an intervention by comparing the average change in the outcome variable experienced by the treated group over time to the average change in the outcome variable experienced by the control group.

Stated preference – survey method which is typically used to identify a person’s willingness to pay. Its key advantage is that it enables a monetary value to be placed on certain impacts of a policy or measure.