St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar Series: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar Series takes place during term time on Wednesday evenings, 18:00-19:30. The current theme for the series of presentations is the 'Economics of Austerity'. The seminars are held in St Catharine's College, Cambridge, usually in the Ramsden Room but sometimes in the McGrath Centre. All are welcome to attend the seminars.
Richard Lewney is Chair of Cambridge Econometrics. Over the past four years Richard Lewney has directed two major research projects for DG Energy to improve the methods of modelling the macroeconomic impacts of low-carbon policies. These have included a better treatment of the roles played by finance and innovation, of regional and income distribution impacts, and also of the relevance of other megatrends to the low-carbon transition. Over 2017-19 Richard Lewney has directed projects for the European Climate Foundation examining: (i) the technological costs and economic impacts of alternative pathways to a net-zero GHG emissions European economy by 2050 and (ii) the economic impacts of decarbonising road freight and car transport. Richard Lewney has previously directed a modelling analysis of the economic impact of environmental degradation to inform an assessment of the role that environmental risk factors could play in sovereign credit risk assessments (and for the UNEP Finance Initiative).
Terry Barker was a Coordinating Lead Author in the IPCC reports AR3 and AR4, 1996-2006, writing the chapters for sectoral mitigation. He was also a member of the team preparing the Synthesis Report for AR3, covering climate science, adaptation and mitigation. He led the writing group of scientists answering the question: "What are the most robust findings and key uncertainties ... regarding model projections of ... costs and benefits of mitigation and adaptation options?" He is the Founder and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR) in Land Economy. He is now a Senior Departmental Fellow in Cambridge and holds an Honorary Chair in The School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia. He is also Founder and Director of Cambridge Econometrics Ltd. He has written extensively on Post Keynesian economics and climate change mitigation policies for the UK, the EU, and at the global scale.
Franziska Sielker is a Lecturer, Planning and Housing, at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Land Economy. Before taking up the Lectureship, Dr Sielker has been Lead Researcher on a project of ‘Future Cities in the Making- Overcoming Barriers to Information Modelling’, funded by the Centre for Digital Built Britain and a British Academy Newton International Postdoc Fellow for a project on power relationships in European spatial policies. Frannziska Sielker has been Interim Professor and Acting Chair of the Chair of ‘International Planning Studies’ in the academic year 2018/2019 at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. Her PhD was at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Human Geography. Her research interests cover European cohesion policies and spatial governance, cross-border regions, influences of foreign direct investments, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, on national planning processes and digitalisation in planning. Dr Sielker has published in terms of her research interests.
Hector Pollitt is the head of modelling at Cambridge Econometrics. He is a post-Keynesian economist with specific expertise in macro-sectoral economic modelling. He is currently researching linkages between post-Keynesian economics and complexity theory. At Cambridge Econometrics, Hector Pollitt oversees the application of the E3ME macro-econometric model, which treats the economy as a dynamic system that both shapes and is influenced by technological development. Using the E3ME model, he has carried out high-level policy analysis for public authorities at UK, EU and global levels. He has worked with the European Commission for over ten years and provided inputs to the recent assessment of the EU's long-term decarbonisation strategy. His other recent work has shown how the development of low-carbon technologies could lead to long-run economic benefits. For example, his modelling for the 2018 New Climate Economy report suggested that limiting global temperature change to 2°C could create $26trn of additional wealth by 2030
Aleksandr Buzgalin is the author of more then 400 publications, including 23 books, translated into a number of languages. His areas of research focus on methodological and fundamental aspects of political economy, in particular contradictions of the late capitalism, caused by the new technological transformations and new qualities of market, money and capital in the era of creative revolution. Results of his research were published in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Science & Society and other journals. He is also the author of books and articles in the sphere of development studies, comparative analysis of economic systems and nature of Russian economy.
Speaker: Sebastian Ille is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the New College of the Humanities and Editor-in-Chief of International Social Science Journal. His areas of expertise and interest focus on the impact of different types of rationality and interaction patterns on the dynamics defining institutions under decentralized decision-making. He also studies the elements of conflict, especially the factors leading to revolutions and new social contracts. His fields of research include Institutional Economics, Behavioural Economics, Development Economics, Identity Economics, Evolutionary Game Theory, Complex Systems and Agent-Based Modelling. He has published on various topics, including theoretical papers on stochastic stability and meta-rationality, and interdisciplinary research on identity economics, rational atrocities and ISIS, as well as forced private tutoring in Egypt. He is currently working on topics related to the Arab Spring in Egypt and on a textbook for social scientists on various mathematical approaches to modelling social systems and social change.
Speaker: Martin Weale is Professor at King's College, London. He joined King’s College in 2016 after completing two three-year terms as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. He had previously been the Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research from 1995 to 2010. In 2011 Queen Mary, University of London appointed him a part-time Professor of Economics - a position he held until 2016.
Until 1995 he was a lecturer in Economics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College (B.A. 1977, Sc.D. 2006). He was a member of the Statistics Commission from 2000 to 2008 and of the Board for Actuarial Standards from 2006 to 2011. Weale was appointed CBE for his services to Economics in 1999 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries in 2001. City University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2007.
Photis Lysandrou is Research Professor at City University Political Economy Research Centre (CITYPERC), Department of International Politics, City University of London. His current research interests are in the areas of the global finance, shadow banking, corporate governance and the political economy of Europe. His recent journal publications include "The Colonisation of the Future: An Alternative View of Financialisation and its Portents", Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, December 2016, and "The Explosive Growth of the US ABCP Market Between 2004 and 2007: A Search for Yield Story" (co-author, Mimoza Shabani), Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, March, 2017. His most recent book is 'Commodity: The Global Commodity System in the 21st Century' published by Routledge.
Speaker: Terry Barker is Professor and Founder of the Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics and a Senior Department Fellow in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. He holds an Honorary Chair in the School of Environmental Sciences in the University of East Anglia, UK. He has written on various aspects of trade, including the variety hypothesis for international trade, international competitiveness, effective protection, the import content of UK final demand categories, and foreign trade in multi-sectoral models. See: https://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pba547.htm
Speaker Hassan Hakimian is Director of the London Middle East Institute and a Reader in Economics at SOAS, University of London. He has published on Middle Eastern economies with a special focus on Iran as well as on human resources and labour markets. His most recent book (co-edited with Parvin Alizadeh) is Iran and the Global Economy: Petro Populism, Islam and Economic Sanctions (Routledge, 2014). His current research is focused on inclusive growth in the MENA region and the economics of Arab uprisings. Hassan Hakimian is a Founding member and currently the President of the 'International Iranian Economic Association (IIEA)' and a Research Fellow and member of the Advisory Committee of the 'Economic Research Forum (ERF)' in Cairo. He is the Founder and Series Editor for the 'Routledge Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa', which he launched in 2003 and is currently editing the Routledge Handbook on the Middle East Economy.
Speaker: Thomas Pope is a Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Thomas works in the tax sector. His main areas of interest include firm investment and the effects of the tax system on large and small businesses. He also works on the public finances
Speaker: Lars Boerner is Senior Lecturer in Economics at King's Business School, King's College London. He is an economist and economic historian who investigates the evolution and development of economies in the long run. He works in particular on the evolution of market and other allocation and clearing mechanisms, the effect of general purpose technologies for long run growth, and alternative ways to measure social and economic interactions in societies, i.e. comparing trade patterns and the spread of diseases. He has published, among others, in the Journal of Political Economy, Explorations in Economic History, and The Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. He has earned his PhD in Economics at the Humboldt Universität Berlin and has been affiliated with the Department of Economics of the Freie Universität Berlin, Stanford University, the European University Institute, and the Department of Economic History of the London School of Economics and Political Sciences.
Speaker: Ahmad Seyf is currently a member of the Cambridge Centre of Economic and Public Policy (CCEPP), and a visiting lecturer at the New College of the Humanities. He taught at the Department of Economics at the University of Staffordshire too. His main research interests are international business economics, globalisation and the economic and social history of the Middle East. Recent publications include, ‘Population and Agricultural Development in Iran, 1800-1906’ in Middle Eastern Studies, 2009, and ‘Iran and the Great Famine, 1870-1872’ in Middle Eastern Studies, 2010. His books include Iran’s Contemporary Political Economy (2012), the Economy of Iran under Ahmadinejad (2012), Crisis in Despotism in Iran (2014), Capitalism and Democracy (2016) and The Great Recession, Iranian view ((2017, Anti-Neoliberalism (2018). His recent publications in English are, The Emerging Economies and the Great Recession (2016), and The Need for Relevant Policies to Tackle Inequality (2017), and Can Tax Reforms Reduce Inequality (2018).v
Speaker Richard Werner is Professor and Chair in International Banking at the University of Southampton (since 2005), and is founding director of the Centre for Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development. He is a Member of Linacre College, Oxford, Convenor of the Association for Research on Banking and the Economy (ARBE), and member of the ECB Shadow Council. He is also the founding chair of Local First, a community interest company establishing not-for-profit community banks in the UK, starting with the Hampshire Community Bank. Richard previously was a Professor of monetary, macro and development economics at Goethe-University Frankfurt and assistant professor at Sophia University, Tokyo. In 1992, as European Commission Fellow at Oxford, Richard integrated the banking system in a macroeconomic model able to distinguish between the impact of bank credit on asset markets and economic growth (the 'Quantity Theory of Disaggregated Credit'), and warned of the coming banking crisis and deep recession in Japan. In 1995 he advanced a post-banking crisis monetary policy to stimulate the economy, which he called 'Quantitative Easing' (followed in 1998 by 'Enhanced Debt Management'). In 2003 he warned of the credit-driven asset bubbles and crises in the eurozone. Richard has published in journals and in books.
Speaker Jagjit Chadha is Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He is on a full time absence of leave as Professor of Economics at the University of Kent and was a part-time Professor of economics at Cambridge. He was previously Professor of Economics at the University of St Andrews and Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. He has worked at the Bank of England as an Official working on Monetary Policy and as Chief Quantitative Economist at BNP Paribas. He has acted as Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Committee and academic adviser to both the Bank of England and HM Treasury. He sits on the Research Committee of the Economics and Social Research Council and on the REF2020 panel. His main research interests are developing the links between finance and macroeconomics in general equilibrium models and he has published widely in economics journals. He has just completed a British Academy Grant to study fiscal data in the 19th century.
John McCombie is Emeritus Professor in Regional and Applied Economics, and Senior Emeritus Fellow of the Department of Land Economy. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association. John is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy; Emeritus Fellow in Economics, Downing College; Director of Studies in Land Economy, Christ’s College, Downing College and Girton College. He was formerly a lecturer in Economics at the University of Hull and at the University of Melbourne. His interests are regional economics, post Keynesian macroeconomics, the causes of variations in national and regional growth rates, income inequality, trade and economic geography and the methodological implications for macroeconomics of the Great Financial Crisis. He is a consultant to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank and was a Special Advisor to a House of Lords Subcommittee inquiring into the EU regional funds. He was a founding co-editor of Spatial Economic Analysis and a former editor of Regional Studies. He has recently published (with Jesus Felipe) a book entitled The Aggregate Production Function and Technical Change; ‘Not Even Wrong’. This presents a fundamental criticism of one of the central concepts of neoclassical macroeconomics. He is currently researching into the economic and philosophical issues (including Rawls’ ‘Justice as Fairness’ and the concept of ‘Just Deserts’) concerning the optimal degree of income inequality.
Claudia Girardone is Professor of Banking and Finance at Essex Business School of the University of Essex. She is also Director of the Essex Finance Centre (EFiC) and the School’s Director of Research. Professor Girardone has published over 50 articles on various aspects of banking and finance in books and peer-reviewed international journals. She is a co-author of the textbook Introduction to Banking (FT Pearson Education, 2015). She is currently on the editorial board of several journals including the Journal of Financial Economic Policy and The European Journal of Finance. Her current research areas are on banking sector performance and stability, bank corporate governance, the industrial structure of banking and access to finance.
Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University. His three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes (1983,1992, 2000) won five prizes and his book on the financial crisis – Keynes: The Return of the Master – was published in September 2010. He was made a member of the House of Lords in 1991 (he sits on the cross-benches) and elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. How Much is Enough? The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life, co-written with his son Edward, was published in July 2012. He is also the author of Britain in the 20th Century: A Success? (Vintage, 2014) and editor of The Essential Keynes (Penguin Classics, 2015). His most recent publications are as co-editor of Who Runs the Economy? (Palgrave, 2016) and Austerity Vs Stimulus Palgrave, 2017).
Speakers: Graham Gudgin is currently Honorary Research Associate at the Centre For Business Research (CBR) in the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. He is also Chief Economic Advisor at Policy Exchange, London, visiting Professor at the University of Ulster and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Ulster University Economic Policy Centre. He was senior Economic Advisor at Oxford Economics from 2007 to 2015 and was director of the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre from 1985 to 1998 when he became Special Adviser to the First Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly until 2002. Prior to this he was economics fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge and a member of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group under Wynne Godley. He is the author of a large number of books, reports and journal articles on regional economic growth in the UK, the growth of small firms and electoral systems. He is currently working with Ken Coutts on a macro-economic model and forecasts for the UK economy and on the economic impact of Brexit. Ken Coutts is Honorary Research Associate at the Centre For Business Research (CBR) in the Judge Business School , Emeritus Assistant Director of Studies in the Faculty of Economics, and Life Fellow in Economics, Selwyn College, at the University of Cambridge. A member of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group in his younger career, led by the late Wynne Godley, his main interests are in macroeconomics, monetary and fiscal policy, trade, capital flows and balance of payments. He has published widely in these areas. He has also written extensively on the pricing behaviour of manufacturing industries in the UK and Australia. He is currently working with Graham Gudgin a macro-economic model and forecasts for the UK economy and on the economic impact of Brexit.
Liliana Harding is lecturer in Economics at the University of East Anglia (UEA), in Norwich. Dr Liliana Harding has a long-standing research interest in the political economy of migration, while her teaching is focussed in the areas of labour economics and European economies. She is currently the convenor of the East Anglia Research Migration Network, an interdisciplinary research group at the UEA designed to facilitate participatory action research in topics related to international migration. Her research interests further extend to the development of economic systems, regional economies and the implications of public arts and culture for wellbeing and urban economies.
Ciaran Driver is Professor of Economics in the School of Finance and Management at SOAS University of London. His research interests include capital investment, industrial economics, innovation and corporate governance on which he has published widely. He has held visiting posts at the Australian National University and Stellenbosch University, has had attachments to several global business schools, and has advised various national and international public bodies. He co-authored with Paul Temple The Unbalanced Economy: a policy appraisal, Palgrave-Macmillan (2014) Beyond Shareholder Value (2013), with colleagues at the TUC and NPI; and he contributed a chapter on innovation and finance to the Sage Handbook on Corporate Governance (2012). An edited compendium on corporate governance (with Grahame Thompson) will be published by OUP in 2018. Recent journal articles deal with the effects of corporate governance on R&D (Research Policy 2012); the economics of advertising (Journal of Economic Surveys 2015) and the perverse effects of high-powered executive pay (Industrial and Corporate Change 2017). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Trustee of the New Economics Foundation. Full publications and further information can be found on Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ciaran_Driver
Ian Hodge is Professor of Rural Economy in the Department of Land Economy and Fellow of Hughes Hall at the University of Cambridge, where he has worked since 1983. He was Head of Department of Land Economy between 2002-2011. His primary research interests are in rural environmental governance, policy and economics, property institutions and rural development. He has previously worked at the Universities of Queensland in Australia and Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. He has a PhD in Countryside Planning from Wye College, University of London and a BSc from the University of Reading.
'Beyond Austerity and Stimulus: Broadening Capital Acquisition with the Earnings of Capital as a Means to Sustainable Fuller Employment and Growth’. Robert Ashford is Bond, Schoeneck & King Distinguished Professor of Law at Syracuse University, where he teaches or has taught courses in Business Associations, Business Planning, Public Corporations, Professional Responsibility, Secured Transactions, Securities Regulation, and Inclusive Capitalism.
Ron Smith is Professor of Applied Economics at Birkbeck, University of London, where he teaches statistics and econometrics.