Connect
About
Dr Natacha Postel-Vinay is an expert in financial stability and regulation, banking, corporate governance, public finance as well as their historical development. She was previously an Associate Professor at LSE and has published in top economics and economic history journals. She now bridges academia and practice, combining research with work on financial transparency and accountability.
Her recent research examines how to reduce risk-taking and moral hazard in the financial system, particularly in the context of bailouts and "bail-ins." In work co-authored with LSE Emeritus Professor Charles Goodhart and initiated during an academic visit at the Bank of England, she analyses the regulatory origins of current incentive frameworks and challenges some of their underlying assumptions ("The Case for Tiered Liability: Evidence from the City of Glasgow Bank Failure").
Her previous research spans a wide range of topics, from her prize-winning analysis of mortgage lending during the US Great Depression to cross-border financial contagion and the relationship between taxation and growth.
Her work is characterised by a careful match between method and question, drawing on approaches ranging from quantitative econometric analysis to qualitative archival research. She has taught and supervised undergraduate, master's, and PhD students on financial topics from 1600 to the present day, with an emphasis on the policy lessons to be learned from historical experience.
Prior to joining LSE, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics at the University of Warwick. In 2013 she won the Economic History Society's New Researcher Prize and was a finalist for the Economic History Association Nevins PhD Dissertation Prize in 2015. She was also nominated several times for LSE Teaching Excellence Awards.
She is currently leading a team developing a free, transparent data platform on macroeconomic and supply-chain sustainability risks for central banks and sovereign debt investors, as part of the EU Horizon-funded research consortium Nature-3B. She is also a Technical Associate of the Taskforce for Nature-Related Financial Disclosure (TNFD). As part this work, she co-authored the Oxford University-Global Canopy-TNFD Report "Evidence Review on the Financial Effects of Nature-Related Risks" (Alvarez et al. 2025).
Research
Goodhart, Charles and Natacha Postel-Vinay (2025). "The Case for Tiered Liability: Evidence from the City of Glasgow Bank Failure" CEPR Discussion Paper 18799.
Cloyne, James, Dimsdale, Nicholas and Natacha Postel-Vinay (2024). "Taxes and Growth: New Narrative Evidence from Interwar Britain," Review of Economic Studies. See Narrative companion background paper here.
Collet, Stéphanie and Natacha Postel-Vinay (2024). "Hot Money Inflows and Bank Risk-Taking: Germany from the 1920s to the Great Depression," Economic History Review. See also CEPR Discussion Paper DP16606.
Vox column here.
Postel-Vinay, Natacha. (2022). "Was the US Great Depression a Credit Boom Gone Wrong?" in Schularick, Moritz (ed.). Leveraged: The New Economics of Debt and Financial Fragility (Chicago University Press).
Postel-Vinay, Natacha. (2017). "Debt Dilution in 1920s America: Lighting the Fuse of a Mortgage Crisis," Economic History Review, 70 (2), pp. 559-585
Postel-Vinay, Natacha. (2016). "What Caused Chicago Bank Failures in the Great Depression? A Look at the 1920s," Journal of Economic History 76 (2), pp. 478-519
Postel-Vinay, Natacha. (2016) "Sitting Ducks: Banks, Mortgage Lending, and the Great Depression in the Chicago Area, 1923-1933." Dissertation summary, Journal of Economic History, 76(2), pp. 595-626.
Public engagement
Guardian, "Remember the global financial crisis? Well, high-risk securities are back"
Guardian Op-Ed, "Until bankers have more to lose themselves, collapses like SVB and Credit Suisse will keep happening."
Various interviews for Bloomberg, BBC Radio 5, BBC Future, the Telegraph, CNBC, Business Insider.
HM Treasury speaker, "The US Way out of the Depression."
Interview for the documentary "Can't Pay, Won't Pay: A Popular History of Taxes," produced by the European TV Channel Arte. You can view Part 1 and Part 2 here. The documentary was premiered in English at the LSE on 24 October 2022.
Toynbee Prize Foundation interview, "War, Plague and Inflation: Is this time different?
Bristol Festival of Economics panelist.