Chicago | Economics for Everyone
A new course designed for people who have never studied economics, but who have big questions about the economy that they would like to answer. Economics - for Everyone.
ECO 3 | Adam Smith 300
Our third magazine celebrates Adam Smith. Born 300 years ago this year, he revolutionised the way we think about society. From collusion to efficiency to alienation, his ideas are still sharp today.
Productivity | Dynamism drops
The UK's productivity slowdown is the nation's biggest economic challenge. Stalling dynamism is a root cause. A page housing my research into this problem.
Research | UK prices
A page housing the UK CPI micro data. These datasets are useful in research into questions about inflation, real wages, and business cycles. Updated monthly.
ECO 2 | Environment
We published the second issue of our magazine to coincide with COP-26. It is packed with facts, and includes my interview with Jane Goodall.
New York Times | American Made
The result of three years of interviews and on-the-ground research American Made shows how journalism is a vital tool in uncovering how economies truly function. A must-read.
ECO 1 | Pandemic
We published a magazine! ECO features some of the top economists from the world of policy and academia, including a rare interview with Clare Lombardelli - chief economist at HM Treasury.
Book | Extreme economies
Extreme economies is now out in 6 different versions - UK, US, Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan. This page has all the covers.
Teaching | Monetary Policy
Charts, papers and thoughts used in my classes on montary policy. Central Banks are facing monumental challenges, and they are set to increase.
Trade | Trade and exchange rates
A pack tracking Britain's trade metrics. The UK trade balances for goods and services, together with the exchange rate, and trade in services charts.
Monetary Policy | Credit Supply
Charts on the supply of loans to UK households and firms. Market interest rates, and the amounts of sterling loans outstanding.
Central Banking | Bank Rate and QE
Charts showing Bank Rate and Quantitative Easing.
Monetary Policy | Rates hit the floor
Chart of official central bank interest rates in the US, UK and Japan.
Central Banks | The rise of inflation targeting
Interactive chart: Following the demise of the Bretton Woods system, exchange rate and monetary targets have gradually dissapeared, to be replaced by inflation targets.
Prices | What drives inflation?
Chart decomposing contributions to CPI inflation
Central Banking | Inflation measures
Interactive chart comparing the three headline measures for the UK, with code to update and visualise the data.
Finance | Why banks fail
Financial crises come around pretty often. This page describes five big historical crashes, drawing links to the crash of 2008 and suggesting ways to spot the next bubble.
New York Times | The Fiction that Makes the World Go Round
A review of the book "Money: the True Story of a Made Up Thing" by Jacob Goldstein. It is a great read: fast-paced and packed with stories and history - thoroughly recommended.
WIRED | Vanishing societies
Some shocks we don't see coming. Others we do. Looming on the horizon is a new stress - the shriking society. I saw these challenges--economic, social and cultural--first hand in Japan.
Coronavirus response | Cutting VAT to help consumers and firms
Rishi Sunak has slashed VAT - will this help shoppers via lower prices, or simply boost firms' profits. A micro data event study for 2008 shows that firms do tend to pass tax savings on to their cu...
Financial Times | The hidden economy
We think of the hidden economy as “underground”, “shadow” or “grey”. In reality it is vibrant, colourful, and well organised. It is also huge, 32% of GDP is the best guess. We need to understand it.
The Guardian | Riots and economics in Chile
Inequality, rioting and a battle of economic ideas in Chile. The remarkable story of how a group of PhD students came to run a nation. To understand Santiago first understand the Chicago Boys.
Industrial Strategy | Post-Brexit ideas for reform
The regulation of business has been a rollercoaster ride for the UK over the past 20 years. We outline an opportunity to build a new system based on transparency, independence and a long-term outlo...
Prices | The UK consumer basket
The source of price rigidity is a foundational question in economics, and this paper sheds new light on when, why and by how much firms change their prices.
Mapping industry | An Atlas of UK firms
Despite the rising interest in addressing the UK’s uneven economic performance, comprehensive analysis setting out the latest facts on Britain’s business geography is scarce.
Sunday Times | The decline of Europe's best city: Glasgow
120 years ago Glasgow was the best city in Europe. Then it fell. How did a hub of innovation and industry sink so low? The answer: Alfred Marshall and some terrible policy choices.
The Guardian | Prison currencies
A long read about the Lousiana prison system, based on my book. The remarkable state lifts the lid on the origins of money and barter and is the home of a remarkable new digital currency innovation.
UK Growth | The LSE Growth Commission
LSE Growth Commission sets out a new blueprint for growth in the UK. Growth that is inclusive and sustainable – and that deals with the challenges facing the UK, old and new.
Goods trade | The stuff Britain sells
This is the UK's most important markets in terms of the goods that we produce and sell. In almost all categories we import more than we export, hence the huge trade deficit in terms of goods.
Export destinations | Look West
There are lots of proposals at the moment for new trade deals with non-EU countries -- places like Canada and Australia seem to be top of the list. But the US by far the most important. This chart ...
Trade bargaining | Where to strike a deal?
A simple way of prioritising who to strike trade deals with is to ask where we export goods. The circles on this chart represent exports to EU and non-EU destinations, and I've made the top 5 darke...
British vigour | Strength in services
The UK's strength in services is longstanding but really exports and the services surplus really started to pick up in the early 2000s.
UK trade | Top 20 trade partners
The UK's top 20 trading partners. Trade is broadly balanced with non-EU countries, but there is a big trade deficit with the EU. In general the UK has trade surpluses with smaller countries.
UK trade | The services boost
Within services Britain's key strength are finance, insurance and "other business". This is things like accountancy, consultancy, and law.
Current account | Borrowing from abroad
Britain has the largest current account deficit of any advanced economy. We have a longstanding shortfall in goods exports, and a new, worrying weakness in our foreign income. Services are strong.
British industry | Top eight sectors
Industry in Britain is pretty concentrated. Firms in the top eight sectors account for more than 70% of all enterprises in every region. Useful to know for targeting an industrial strategy.
Britain's trade balance | Propped up by finance
Brexit is going to hit some industries harder than others. Things look ominous for finance. A hard Brexit for the City will hit the pound. Britain's BoP is weak, and is propped up by finance.
The Times | Sell up, and save the City
For the City of London an uncomfortable anniversary is fast approaching. December 1, 2008 was the nadir of British finance, the day that Alistair Darling put £15 billion of public money into Royal ...
The Economist | Why pyramid schemes target women
On the face of it these seem like tough times for financial scammers. The crash of 2008 burned investors, exposed fraudsters and has forced regulators to toughen up. Yet dodgy “pyramid” investment ...
The Economist | How to make inheritance an incentive
A rising number of families has huge walls of cash to leave to their lucky offspring. Many parents worry that too much too young can breed laziness, and a new industry helping parents guide their o...
Product sabotage | Why Companies Make Their Products Worse
There is much about computing to make the blood boil – the badly timed crashes and the endless software updates are frustrating. Yet most annoying of all is the fact that some products seem needles...
Brazil's slump | The crash of a titan
IT IS easy for a visitor to Rio to feel that nothing is amiss in Brazil. The middle classes certainly know how to live: with Copacabana and Ipanema just minutes from the main business districts a g...
Interest Rates | A limited lift-off
There are two schools of thought when it comes to rich-world interest rates in 2015. Some reckon that, after such a long period stuck to the floor, rates must rise as growth returns and unemploymen...
Short-termism | Measuring the Costs of Short-Termism
A potential cost of modern capital markets is short-termism, with agents in the financial intermediation chain weighing near-term outcomes too heavily at the expense of longer-term opportunities an...
Modern banks | Too Big to Be Efficient? Implicit Subsidies and...
We examine whether “too-big-to-fail” (TBTF) factors affect estimates of scale economies for large banks. From a standard model of bank production that does not control for any TBTF factors, we find...
Reforming economics | Keynes's new heirs
FOR economists 2008 was a nightmare. The people who teach and research the discipline mocked by Thomas Carlyle, a 19th-century polemicist, as “the dismal science”, not only failed to spot the preci...
Surge pricing | The microeconomics of Uber
NEW competitors always ruffle a few feathers. The unique thing about Uber, a new taxi-market player, is that it seems to have annoyed some of its customers as much as the incumbent cabbies it threa...
Gregor MacGregor | King of the Con Men
The story of Poyais, the mythical country at the centre of the world's biggest swindle. From Ponzi to Madoff history has many famous financial criminals. None come close to Gregor MacGregor.
William Petty | The man who invented economics
WILLIAM PETTY was an innovation machine. He designed an early form of catamaran, conceived of a mechanical grain planter, proposed attaching engines to boats and patented a “double-writing” instrum...
Silicon Valley | The rise of microeconomics
ON THE face of it, economics has had a dreadful decade: it offered no prediction of the subprime or euro crises, and only bitter arguments over how to solve them. But alongside these failures, a sm...
The foundations of money | On the origin of specie
MONEY is perhaps the most basic building-block in economics. It helps states collect taxes to fund public goods. It allows producers to specialise and reap gains from trade. It is clear what it doe...
Financial contagion | Economic epidemiology
Predicting financial contagionCAN Greece leave the euro quietly? Its size would suggest so: the Greek economy is just 2% of the euro area's GDP. But so far the Greek crisis has had plenty of noisy ...
Merger waves | Explaining the M&A cycle
IN 1900 America had around 500 carmakers; by 1908 it had 200. In 1960 Britain had 16 banks; ten years later it had just six. In both cases, this rapid consolidation came about because of a flurry o...
Boosting competition | Ports in the storm
LISBON'S harbour mixes pleasure with business. Bars and restaurants sit alongside industrial machinery and colossal container ships. The combination works: shiny cranes gleam in the sunset as touri...
Banking history | Evolution of the UK banking sector
The financial system provides three key services: payment services, intermediation between savers and borrowers, and insurance against risk. These services support the allocation of capital, and th...
Market mypoia | The short long
Is the world becoming short-sighted? As individuals, it sometimes feels that way. Information is streamed in ever greater volumes and at ever rising velocities. Timelines for decision-making appear...
