Rising inequality is a key focus in today’s policy discussions and media discourse. Building on research from The Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School (INET Oxford), Professor Brian Nolan, Director of the Employment, Equity and Growth Programme at INET Oxford and Professor John Muellbauer, Deputy Director of Economic Modelling at INET Oxford, will consider the causes and consequences of inequality, and what can be done to address it.
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About the speakers
Professor Brian Nolan is Director of INET’s Employment, Equity and Growth Programme and Professor of Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention. He was previously Principal of the College of Human Sciences and Professor of Public Policy at University College Dublin.
He is an economist by training, with a doctorate from the London School of Economics, and his main areas of research are income inequality, poverty, and the economics of social policy.
Recent research has focused on trends in income inequality and their societal impacts, the distributional effects of the economic crisis, social inclusion in the EU, top incomes, deprivation and multiple disadvantage, and tax/welfare reform. He has been centrally involved in a range of collaborative cross-country research networks and projects, most recently the Growing Inequalities’ Impacts (GINI) multi-country research project on inequalities and their impacts funded by the EU’s Framework Programme 7.
Recent books published by Oxford University Press include The Handbook of Economic Inequality (2008) which he co-edited with Wiemer Salverda and Tim Smeeding, Poverty and Deprivation in Europe (2011) co-authored with Christopher T. Whelan, The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income (2013), edited with Stephen Jenkins, Andrea Brandolini and John Micklewright, and two co-edited volumes from the GINI project in 2013.
Professor John Muellbauer is Deputy Director of Economic Modelling at The Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, a Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, and an Official Fellow of Nuffield College.
He is primarily an applied macroeconomist, though his microeconomic textbook with Angus Deaton, Economics and Consumer Behaviour, CUP 1980, is still in print. His 1980 paper with Angus Deaton, ‘An Almost Ideal Demand System’ in the American Economic Review was selected as one of the top twenty papers published in the first one hundred years of that journal. One important aim of his current research is to achieve a better understanding of interactions between the financial sector and the real economy. A major element is to study the impact of credit market liberalization on consumer debt, spending and housing markets in the UK, US, and Australia and non-liberalisation in Japan to throw new light on monetary transmission, financial stability and monetary policy. Closely related is studying the determinants of mortgage defaults in the UK, and examining forecast scenarios highly relevant to stress-testing of the banking system.
Other recent research includes modelling house prices and mortgage stocks in major economies, regional housing and labour markets in the UK, modelling and forecasting inflation and exchange rate passthrough and forecasting growth in the G7 countries. The macroeconomics of the South African economy is a continuing research interest. An important theme in his research has been the impact of institutional differences both across countries and through time, on monetary transmission and macroeconomic fluctuations. He has contributed extensively to the UK debate over housing market issues, including property taxation, and also to the argument as to whether the UK should join the Euro. He is a Fellow of both the Econometric Society and the European Economic Association
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