When Teddy Jackson retired as IES Director in 1982 after focusing on devel­opment economics, the University proposed closing the Institute as part of the savings it needed, but offered the first author (newly arrived from LSE) the chance to run it (unpaid) to see if it could pay its way.

By renegotiating the royalties accruing to its Bulletin sufficiently to fund a full-time Director, in 1984 Steve Nickell (see Ours 2018 for more detail) was attracted to that role, which he held until IES was merged into the new Department of Economics.

It often surprises readers that despite having existed for hundreds of years, Oxford did not have a department of economics until almost the end of the twentieth century (for a brief history, see https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/ about/about-homepage). Before 1997, economics teaching was college based, with colleges having their own fellows who taught PPE. There was a taught BPhil degree for graduates from 1945, which became an MPhil in 1979, with much more technical economics and econometrics content. Over this period, economics had a “sub-faculty” status with IES and Nuffield College being focal points. By way of comparison, the Department of Statistics was only created in 1988.

4.1