Origins, Education and Career
John Muellbauer was born in a hamlet in the foothills of the Alps in southwest Bavaria. His father, Norbert, was a scientist in the field of electronics, who had lost his wartime scientist’s exemption from military service owing to strongly anti-Nazi views.
His mother, Edith Gruber, hailed from Vienna, where she studied piano at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, but later had to work as a laboratory assistant. To survive the Nazi era, she and her spouse obscured the Jewish heritage of her father, who had been a City Councillor in Vienna. In the early 1950s, John’s parents took advantage of an opportunity for his father in the electronics industry, and the family emigrated to the UK, first to South Wales and later to London. Aided by a diligent teacher and the efforts of his mother, John quickly learned English and was able to excel in his entrance exams to grammar school, later gaining admission to King’s College, Cambridge.As an undergraduate at Cambridge, his tutors in economics included Christopher Bliss, Frank Hahn, Robin Marris and Luigi Pasinetti, and he enjoyed studying sociology with John Goldthorpe.[200] The young lecturer, Charles Goodhart, influenced his thinking on balance sheets and monetary transmission. Following Cambridge, John pursued his PhD at Berkeley. Lectures from the Nobel Laureate Dan McFadden introduced him to duality theory, which John drew on in his early solo-authored contributions to economics and in his joint work with Angus Deaton. He studied econometrics with Dale Jorgenson and Edmond Malinvaud, and statistics with Henry Scheffe. Two other Berkeley giants were particularly influential. One was Aaron Gordon, whose coverage of business cycles emphasised econometric analysis of the major components of GDP and the role of financial crises, drawing on Kindleberger's and Minsky's early work. The second was Robert (“Bob”) Hall, who supervised John's dissertation on applying hedonics and index number theory to measuring prices for consumer and producer durable goods; his later work on the consumption Euler equation, Hall (1978), posed challenges addressed by John's subsequent time series contributions.
Following his graduate studies at Berkeley, John returned to the UK to begin a long and distinguished career as an academic. He has a son (and three grandchildren) from his first marriage, and a daughter from his subsequent marriage to Janine Aron, an Oxford economist and co-author.
John began in academia as a Lecturer at Warwick in 1969, moving in 1972 to Birkbeck College, where colleagues included Richard Portes, A.G. (“Bertie”) Hines, John Broome, and later, Dennis Snower. He was a Lecturer, then Reader, and finally Professor of Economics at Birkbeck.[201] In 1981, he moved to Nuffield College, Oxford, as Official Fellow (1981-2011), Senior Research Fellow (2012-present) and Professor of Economics (1997-present). Over the years, his Nuffield colleagues included a sextet of Sirs, Tony Atkinson, David Cox, Andrew Dilnot, David Hendry, James Mirrlees and Stephen Nickell, and other distinguished academics, including Steve Bond, Terence Gorman, Paul Klemperer, Meg Meyer, Bent Nielsen, Avner Offer, Neil Shephard, Hyun Shin and John Vickers. This range of talents, the interdisciplinary atmosphere of an outstanding graduate social science college and interaction with its students provided a highly stimulating environment. The College freed John to pursue research he judged important, independently of the fashions of the time. It also enabled him to interact with visiting fellows from the world outside academia. John served on the Investment Committee throughout his time at Nuffield until 2016 and was the Investment Bursar for 13 years, including during the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000-2002 and the global financial crisis and its aftermath during 2008-2016. He taught for over 30 years on the Oxford MPhil programme and supervised MPhil and DPhil students, many of whom have become eminent economists. He has also been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School (2012-present), which under the respective leaderships of Eric Beinhocker and Ian Goldin have taken an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to new levels, addressing the most important problems of the age.
Apart from his academic career, John's engagement in policy debate has included an active role in advising policy makers. In the UK, he served on the Chancellor’s group of economic advisers in 1990 and played an important role on the Retail Price Index Advisory Committee in 1993—1996. He provided a central part of the case in 1997-1998 for why the UK failed to meet the Treasury’s “five economic tests” for entering the Eurozone.[202] For many years, he served on the expert housing panel advising the relevant ministry and has been an expert witness for the House of Lords and the Treasury Select Committee. He and Janine Aron produced six reports from 2009 to 2014 for the UK government’s housing ministry on mortgage arrears and repossessions (see, for example, Aron and Muellbauer 2016). He has engaged widely with many central banks on policy, modelling and research issues since 2000. In the early 2000s, he assisted the Bank of England in measuring credit conditions (see Fernandez-Corugedo and Muellbauer 2006). For the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), he and Aron assembled the first time series of household balance sheets for any emerging market economy (see Aron and Muellbauer 2006), now regularly published by the SARB and used in their core model. Together, they have contributed over 20 policy-relevant research papers on South Africa, including on monetary policy, forecasting output and inflation, modelling consumption and debt, and measuring exchange rate pass-through, for example, see Aron and Muellbauer (2000, 2002, 2012, 2013a) and Aron et al. (2014a). John has also worked with charitable foundations and think tanks such as Shelter, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation, the Resolution Foundation, the Institute for Public Policy Research and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and international organisations, including the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Since the global financial crisis, John’s hitherto less fashionable macroapproach has received significant and increasing attention. This began with an invited presentation to the 2007 Jackson Hole conference on “Housing, Housing Finance, and Monetary Policy” (see Muellbauer 2007) and a request from the BIS in 2009 to evaluate the policy-modelling framework conventional among central banks (see Muellbauer 2010). Since 2006, a research collaboration on macro-financial linkages, housing and financial stability proved fruitful with John Duca at the Dallas Fed, later including Anthony Murphy (see Duca et al. 2010, 2011, 2016, 2019; Duca and Muellbauer 2014). John was awarded a Wim Duisenberg Fellowship at the European Central Bank (ECB) for collaboration with ECB, Bundesbank and Banque de France researchers to develop better models for macro-financial linkages (see Geiger et al. 2016; Chauvin and Muellbauer 2018). SARB Research Fellowships during 2018-2020 have supported work with Aron on the SARB’s new financial stability mandate (see Aron et al. 2019a, b).
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