Simon Appleton is an Associate Professor at the School of Economics, University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests lie primarily in the areas of poverty, labor markets, health and education, with application to China and sub-Saharan Africa. His current research examines the impact of the financial crisis in China, the relation between school test scores and economic growth, and the dynamics of poverty and inequality. Some of the current research is being funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK and has been carried out within the Centre for Research on Economic Development and International Trade (CREDIT), based in the University of Nottingham. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, and Internal Fellow of the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham. He is a member of the editorial boards the Journal of Development Studies and African Development Review. He has published in a range of journals including Economic Development and Cultural Change, the Journal of African Economies, the Journal of International Development, the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics and World Development.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in May 2012.