Ben's blog and articles

Jean Tirole throws his head back and laughs. “You’re kidding!” he exclaims. I’m not kidding, I insist. It’s true. I explain to him, once again, that when proposals for regulatory price caps on energy bills are floated, politicians and respectable commentators in Britain tend to start discussing Marxism. Tirole’s incredulity is significant. The 64-year-old Frenchman won the Nobel memorial prize in economics in 2014 for his pioneering theoretical work on how utilities ought to

As you would expect, Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate economist and possibly America’s most influential liberal commentator, gets inundated with emails from the general public. But one seems to have lodged in his mind. It came in August after Krugman had savaged Donald Trump for pardoning the notorious immigrant-brutalising Nevada sheriff, Joe Arpaio. In his regular New York Times column Krugman claimed that Trump’s pardon amounted to an endorsement of American-style fascism.

Who will be the next winner of the Nobel Prize in economics? One answer is that it might be a modest and quietly spoken professor who sits in an eyrie-like office, high above the busy Euston Road in central London. Earlier this year, Richard Blundell was awarded the Nemmers Economics Prize, second in prestige only to the Nobel. Seven of the past 11 Nemmers winners have gone on to win a Nobel. And Blundell has been widely tipped in recent years for the profession’s big gong it

On the floor of Gertjan Vlieghe’s wood-panelled Bank of England office sits a small doorstop in the shape of a hedgehog – an animal not renowned for its speed. And its patient owner is certainly in no hurry to put up interest rates. Mr Vlieghe, 46, who joined the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee as an external member in 2015 has established himself as the most dovish member of the rate-setting committee. Even before the Brexit referendum Mr Vlieghe was publicly fretting about

Stephen Nickell is “slightly miffed” at Mervyn King. It’s nothing to do with the former Bank of England Governor’s quixotic views on Brexit. It’s nothing to do with any disagreement the two men might have had when they both served on the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee in the years before the 2008 financial crisis. It’s nothing to do with King’s supportive noises towards George Osborne’s austerity policies. This grudge is more ancient than any of that stuff. As young academi