Academic Profile

Research interests: Life-cycle behaviour, including savings, consumption and working patterns of households.

Hamish is the James Meade Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Hamish joined the Nuffield in 2018 from the University of Cambridge, where was a Professor of Economics and Fellow of Trinity College, and where he had been a member of the Faculty of Economics since 1998. Hamish holds a PhD in Economics from University College London, and an MPhil in Economics and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.

Hamish’s research agenda is focused on three connected sets of issues: first, what sort of uncertainty do individuals face over their lifetimes; second, how do individuals respond to this uncertainty; and third, what is the role of government, especially through social insurance, in mitigating this uncertainty. The uncertainty that individuals face is partly due to economic risks, such as to their future wages or employment, to the value of their assets, such as housing and pensions, and economy-wide risks such as of recessions or financial contractions. Individuals also face risks to their health and to family structure, and these risks often have economic implications, such as when health shocks mean individuals are unable to work. These issues are both microeconomic and macroeconomic, which are addressed using computer simulation and structural econometrics to model and estimate realistic economic environments.

Hamish’s work has been published in leading economic journals including the American Economic Review and Econometrica.