Richard Davies is a leading economist and author. Richard will take on teaching duties at the School of Public Policy in 2024 and is the new Director of the Growth Co-Lab at LSE, a research collaboration with Harvard University’s Growth Lab that provides advice to governments on inclusive growth practices, with recent projects in Namibia, Tanzania and South Africa.

Prior to joining the LSE, he taught at the University of Chicago and ran their new Economics for Everyone initiative—a project providing open-access materials in order to broaden public engagement and understanding of economics. He is the founding director of the UK's Economics Observatory, holds a chair as the Professor of the Public Understanding of Economics at Bristol University and is a visiting Professor at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. Before academia he worked in policy and journalism: he has been Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers at HM Treasury, an economist and speechwriter at the Bank of England, and economics editor of The Economist.

Richard's book Extreme Economies (2020) won the Lonely Planet/Stanford's prize for debut travel writing, and has been published in the UK , US, Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan. He wrote and edited The Economist’s Guide to Economics (2015), and his articles have featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. He is committed to raising public engagement with economics and is director, with Professor Diane Coyle, of the annual Festival of Economics.

Also an active researcher, Richard is interested in using micro data to answer questions about aggregate puzzles, including those relating to inflation, productivity, and trade. His most recent paper, a collaboration with colleagues at the Resolution Foundation, tracks the decline in British dynamism and proposes policies to reinvigorate it. Previous work with LSE colleagues has identified the inflationary impact of trade policy in the UK. He studied economics at Oxford (PPE), the London School of Economics (MSc) and holds a PhD from New York University's Stern School of Business.

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