John Muellbauer's 1997-98 Annual Research Report

John Muellbauer (Official Fellow) continued work in the area of his ESRC project with David Hendry on ‘Modelling Non-stationarity in Economic Time Series’, funding for which began in January 1998. On leave for Michaelmas Term 1997, he spent one month at the University of Cape Town researching saving behaviour in South Africa. In joint work with Janine Aron, this resulted in two papers. One assembles for the first time wealth estimates at market values for South Africa. The other demonstrates the importance of wealth effects for consumer expenditure in South Africa and studies the considerable impact of financial liberalization on consumption and debt. A new methodology is developed for studying the impact of such difficult to measure structural changes.

With Gavin Cameron, he worked on regional earnings, migration and commuting in Great Britain in a panel data context. This research confirms strong housing market effects both on regional migration and on regional commuting patterns. This helps to explain the re-emergence of the North-South divide in Great Britain and the inflationary pressures and inefficiencies associated with these regional imbalances. The policy implications were explored both in a published paper and elsewhere.

John Muellbauer gave papers at the Reserve Bank of South Africa, at two World Bank conferences, at the European Meetings of the Econometric Society in Berlin and at the Universities of Manchester, Cape Town, Louvain-La-Neuve, Bergen and Oxford. He continued on the Council of the Royal Economic Society.