Professor Phill Wheat

Profile

Professor Phill Wheat is an applied economist and econometrician at the University of Leeds.

Employment History

• 2022 onwards Professor, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds
• 2017 – 2022 Associate Professor, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds
• 2010 – 2016 Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds
• 2009 – 2014 Visiting Researcher, Centre for Transport Studies, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI)
• 2005 - 2010    Research Fellow, Institute for Transport      Studies, University of Leeds
• 2003 - 2005   Consultant, Faber Maunsell
• 2002 - 2003   Assistant, Faber Maunsell

Research Project Experience

• 2015 onwards

Local Authorities – CQC Efficiency Network (2015 onwards)

Dr Wheat is Co-founder of the CQC Efficiency Network (subscription service) – A collaborative network of highways departments of Local Authorities in Britain to enable the identification of best practice in highway maintenance.

• 2015

Office of Rail and Road – Benchmarking Highways England

With KPMG, Phill is advising ORR on what data and techniques can be used in future to assess the efficiency and performance of Highways England .

• 2013 - 2015

Highways Maintenance Efficiency Programme – Cost Quality Customer Statistical Benchmarking for Highways Authorities (2013-2015)

Phill has piloted the development of statistical cost benchmarking models for Local Authority highway departments to guide adoption of best practice to yield best value.

• 2015

Competition and Markets Authority – Advice on the relative costs of open access operators relative to franchise operators

Comparison of the costs of open access operators relative to franchised passenger operators using an econometric model developed over a number of research projects. Used by CMA to inform their recent project on competition in the passenger rail industry.

• August 2009 – April 2015

Top-down Infrastructure Econometric International Benchmarking (Office of Rail Regulation funded)
Benchmarking study utilising stochastic frontier methods with data from several European and world infrastructure managers. Builds on earlier work used in the 2008 Periodic Review.

• January 2012 – January 2013

Advice on Statistical Confidence of Appraisal Non-Work Values of Time (Department for Transport funded)
Project to determine confidence intervals on values of travel time used by DfT in order to understand uncertainty surrounding these estimates.

• December 2011 – April 2013

The impact of large changes in Generalised Journey Time on rail passenger demand (ATOC funded)
Project to look at enhancements to econometric demand models to examine whether there is empirical support for different GJT elasticities depending on the size of the GJT change.

• 2011 – 2015

SUSTRAIL (EU Seventh Framework Programme funded)
Phill is project director for ITS’s inputs into this €9m project examining means to make rail freight sustainable. ITS are work package leader for work examining economic appraisal and incentives for implementation including research on differentiating access charges.

• September 2009- December 2010

Econometric Evidence on Train Operating Company size (Office of Rail Regulation funded)
Econometric analysis to determine potential cost savings from merging various passenger train operating companies in Great Britain.

• August 2009 – October 2009

Audit of Train Operating Cost Module in NMF (National Audit Office funded)
Phill undertook a review of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing train operating cost module in the DfT’s National Modelling Framework, both in terms of its internal composition and how it related to other modules in the framework.

• 2009-2010

Development of an Enhanced Train Operating Cost Module in NMF (Department for Transport)
Econometric efficiency cost analysis to inform the enhanced train operating cost module for the revised NMF currently under development. The analysis provides objective information to validate the assumptions in the module and provide parameters.

•  2008-2010

Concessionary fares – reimbursement of bus operators – econometric demand modelling (Department for Transport funded)
Econometric analysis of STATS100A data to inform the elasticities of demand in order to better determine reimbursement to operators resulting from resent reforms to the concessionary travel system in England.

• November 2006 – September 2010

Rail Research UK Project B7: Railway System Cost Modelling (EPSRC funded)
Study of railway passenger train operators cost and performance post privatisation. It examined the impact on TOC performance of different franchise contracting arrangements, highlighted the best performing TOCs .

• December 2007 – May 2009

International Benchmarking of Network Rail’s efficiency performance (Office of Rail Regulation funded)
Benchmarking study utilising stochastic frontier methods with regional data from several European and world infrastructure managers. The work feed into the 2008 Periodic Review of Network Rail’s finances.

• September 2007 – May 2009

Cost Allocation of Transport Infrastructure CATRIN (EU Sixth Framework funded)
The work on rail infrastructure costs focuses on addressing the key outstanding empirical research needs, including addressing the modelling of renewals costs and investigating the reasons for differences in results across EU countries. Phill was responsible for ITS’ inputs and managing the rail work package, which involved partners from over five organisations acrossEurope.

•  August 2008 – January 2009

Public transport reform Outline Business Case (Department of Regional Development – Northern Ireland funded)
Advice to DRD regarding reform ofNorthern Ireland’s public transport system. In particular Phill’s input focuses on benchmarking the performance of Translink relative to international comparators and utilising this information to inform the best organisational structure to adopt.

• January 2008 – February 2008

Review of Network Rail’s Strategic Business Plan (Office of Rail Regulation funded)
Independent review of the structure and level of access charges contained in Network Rail’s Strategic Business Plan.

• January 2006

Structure of Costs and Charges Review – review of work on avoidable costs and on cost variability (Office of Rail Regulation funded)
Independent review of the ORR’s recent consultancy projects on charging for variable and fixed costs of infrastructure use.

• July 2005 – December 2006

Generalisation of Research on Accounts and Cost Estimation (GRACE) – Estimating the marginal cost of wear and tear of rail infrastructure usage (EU Sixth Framework funded)
The work on rail infrastructure usage utilised data supplied by Network Rail to estimate a cost function for maintenance expenditure for theUKrail network. The project also contributed to Network Rails understanding of cost trends and drivers of maintenance expenditure.

•  April 2005 – June 2006

Rail Research UK – Project B4: System Level Cost framework for the assessment of sub-system tradeoffs (EPSRC funded)
The main aim of this project is to identify and quantify techno-economic tradeoffs within the railway system.

• Module Leader Transport Econometrics

This module covers econometric material relevant to analysis of economic data in transport. It emphasizes the applied nature of the discipline through student led illustrative practical examples and the crucial linkage between economics and statistics the forms the econometrics discipline.

• Dissertation supervision

Phill has supervised a number of undergraduate economics and post graduate economics dissertations across a range of topics including the incentives of opt-in organ donation to the impact of open access competition in railways. Phill is actively seeking to supervise PhD students in a variety of economics applications both within transport applications and wider regulation of infrastructure issues. He welcomes discussions with potential students about possible research topics and how to tailor research to meet the objectives of individual students.

Responsibilities

• Deputy Director (Deputy Head of School)

Research interests

Professor Phill Wheat is a transport economist and applied econometrician whose primary area of interest is the analysis of transport costs and how these are influenced by the competitive, market structure and institutional factors within transport markets. His work is a mixture of applied econometric analysis, development of econometric performance measurement techniques and regulatory economics. Phill's work includes collaborative theoretical research in econometrics with William Greene of New York University examining issues in econometric performance models.

He has wide ranging experience of cost and performance analysis in the rail sector including important studies for the Office of Rail Regulation and Department for Transport.

He is also actively developing new economic research avenues in Local and Strategic Highways. Professor Wheat is Co-founder of the CQC Efficiency Network  – A collaborative network of highways departments of Local Authorities in Britain to enable the identification of best practice in highway maintenance.

A flavour of Professor Wheat's research is given in the following presentations:

Returns to scale and density in passenger train operations in the presence of heterogeneity in outputs

Quantifying and decomposing the uncertainty in appraisal value of travel time savings

Phill is actively seeking to supervise PhD students in a variety of economics applications both within transport applications and wider regulation of infrastructure issues. He welcomes discussions with potential students about possible research topics and how to tailor research to meet the objectives of individual students.

• CQC Efficiency Network - Customer, Quality, Cost

Qualifications

• PhD, “Econometric cost analysis in vertically separated railways”, University of Leeds
• MA, Transport Economics, University of Leeds
• BSc (Honours), Economics and Econometrics, University of Nottingham

Research groups and institutes

• Economics and Appraisal