CV
Short Bio
Simon Wren-Lewis is currently Emeritus Professor of Economics at Oxford University and also an Emeritus Fellow at Merton College. He was previously Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, and before that a professor in the Economic Department at Oxford. He began his career as an economist in H.M.Treasury, and then moved to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, where he ended up as Head of Macroeconomic Research. In 1990 he became a professor at Strathclyde University, and from 1995 to 2006 he was a professor at Exeter University. He has published papers on macroeconomics in a wide range of academic journals including the Economic Journal, European Economic Review, and American Economic Review. Since becoming an academic he has advised H.M.Treasury, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and the Office for Budget Responsibility. He writes on economic policy issues in various publications and at his blog: mainlymacro.blogspot.com.
Academic work has often had a strong policy focus. In 1989 he published, with colleagues at the National Institute, a study suggesting that an entry rate of 1.95 DM/£ into the ERM was too high, which at the time was a minority view. In 2002 he wrote one of the background papers for the Treasury's 2003 assessment of its five economic tests for joining EMU. He was also the principal external advisor to the Bank of England on the development of its core macroeconomic models. A long time advocate of Fiscal Councils, his 2007 proposal was influential in the formation of the UK‘s Office of Budget Responsibility. He was a member the Labour Party's Economic Advisory Council from 2015 to 2016. Since starting his blog at the end of 2011, he has written extensively about macroeconomic policy in the UK and the Eurozone.
Longer Bio
This blog post provides more detail on the major highlights of my career, written on the occasion of winning the New Statesman/SPERI prize for Political Economy