Short Bio

I grew up in Germany, France and the United States. I read for a B.A. and later an M.A. in Economics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. In 1992, I started my D.Phil at the University of York under the supervision of Alan Sutherland, graduating four years later. My first job as an academic was at Reading University. This was followed by a stint as an economist at the Bank of England. In 2003, I returned to academia, taking up a lectureship at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. After almost seven years in Scotland, I moved to New Zealand to become Associate Professor and later Professor of Macroeconomics at Victoria University of Wellington. I returned to the UK in 2013 and now hold a Chair in Economics at the University of Sheffield.

My research is focused on dynamic macroeconomics. Much of my work analyses on the sources of business cycle fluctuations in open economies. My recent work has been on modelling the effects of news shocks in small open economies; on how commodity price shocks affect labour market dynamics; on how shocks to net migration affect the business cycle, and recently on what drives international spillovers of fiscal policy. I have previously studied the role and importance of shocks originating in the financial sector and how financial shocks are transmitted from one country to the next via the banking system. In short, much of my research is about shocking stuff and business cycles.  

I am affiliated to the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at the Australian National University where I am a director for the Open Economy Macroeconomics program, together with Martin Berka from Massey University. I'm an Honorary Research Associate at Victoria University of Wellington, a Committee Member of the Money Macro and Finance Society and a Co-Editor of the Scottish Journal of Political Economy.