Introduction1
John Muellbauer is a distinguished Oxford economist who has made notable, especially applied, contributions in the economics of demand analysis, consumption, housing and financial stability, and in macroeconomics more generally.
His influential co-authored paper, “An Almost Ideal Demand System”, published in 1980, was selected as one of the best 20 papers published in the first 100 years of the American Economic Review. It was prominently mentioned by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, amongst his publications, when the paper's co-author, Angus Deaton, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2015. Their highly regarded book, Economics and Consumer Behaviour, also published in 1980, has been widely used in graduate courses and cited over 7,000 times.2 The book is considered a modern classic: it was described as a landmark by Blundell (1988) more than three decades ago, and this was reiterated by Besley (2016; see also Besley et al. 2011). John's research1 Please note that the views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve System.
2 As reported by Research Papers in Economics (RePEC).
J. Duca (*)
Oberlin College, Ohio and Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA e-mail: jduca@oberlin.edu
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R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_26
spans theory and empirics, and it emphasises the importance of using empirical evidence to assess the former while requiring the latter to be well-grounded in theory.
Two prominent themes have pervaded John's research: addressing theoretical consistency and reducing misspecification in empirical models, partly by incorporating institutional heterogeneity across countries and over time; and using evidence to engage in policy debates.
These considerations have motivated his development of theory-based, empirical frameworks, flexible enough to encompass an eclectic set of influences and insights, and yet sufficiently tractable to avoid the curse of dimensionality and be able to yield robust and reliable estimates. This emphasis on consistency, completeness and practicality has played a role in his interests evolving from mainly microeconomics to macroeconomics. Since the early 1980s, a major focus of his research has been modelling aggregate consumption and housing markets and analysing the role of housing in the wider economy. More recently, his research has broadened to cover the interconnections between macroeconomics and financial stability.John has long engaged in prominent policy debates in the UK. These include the UK's supposed productivity growth revolution of the early 1980s, Thatcher's misconceived poll tax of the late 1980s and the collapse of the UK savings rate in the 1980s. He argued that the UK's departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) was inevitable in 19923 and explained why Britain should not adopt the euro as its currency. He has made influential and significant contributions over many years to debates about reforming UK housing policy. Through newspaper articles and VoxEU, he has engaged a wider audience in macroeconomic policy debates, for instance, on inflation and exchange rate pass-through (Muellbauer and Aron 2008; Aron and Muellbauer 2014a, b), a prescient article on the imminence of a housing-led recession (Muellbauer 2008a), early articles encouraging credit easing by central banks during the global financial crisis (Muellbauer 2008b, c), Eurobonds and the Eurozone's sovereign debt crisis (Muellbauer 2011), monetary policy lessons from Japan (Muellbauer and Murata 2011), fiscal policy lessons and the UK's ‘lost generation' (Muellbauer 2014a), “QE for the People” (Muellbauer 2014b, 2016a), and the failure of central bank models (Muellbauer 2016b).
John has combined an Oxford tradition of robust econometric testing with a Cambridge tradition of developing the implications of the insights of John
3Two days before the UK was forced to leave the ERM, the Financial Times published John's oped explaining why the exchange rate was unsustainable. In the immediate aftermath, in another oped, he argued that the outcome would be benign, forecasting correctly that inflation would be subdued.
Maynard Keynes and Richard Stone. His work also extends later insights on wealth and asset prices from Franco Modigliani, James Tobin and Robert Shiller, on expectations from Robert Hall, and on credit constraints from George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz. His many honorary distinctions include election as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1975, a Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Research Fellow in 1983, a Fellow of the British Academy in 1997, and a Fellow of the European Economic Association in 2006. John has also served on the editorial boards of the Review of Economic Studies and Econometrica, inter alia.
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