Professor of Business Economics
Background
BSc (St Andrews); 91 (California, Berkeley); MA (California, Berkeley); PhD (California, Berkeley).
I worked as a physicist for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority before attending the University of California, Berkeley for my 91. I subsequently worked as Production Planning Manager in the pharmaceutical industry for the Eli Lilly Corporation, before returning to Berkeley to complete a PhD.
I have been an academic at the University of Edinburgh since 1976, save for a four year period (1987-91) when I was Chairman of the School of Economics at the University of St Andrews. I also served as Head of the School of Economics at Edinburgh in 1991-93 and again in 1995-97, was Head of the Economics, Business Studies and Accounting and Business Method "Planning Unit" in 1995-96, and Director of Post-Graduate Studies in the Business School (2005-2007).
I started my academic career as a UC Berkeley trained labour economist, and over time my interests focused on a particular area known as the “economics of personnel”. Working in this area, I covered topics such as corporate governance, top executive pay and tournament theory. Most recently, in something of a diversification of interests, I have also been working on the margins of economic history.
In the 1980s, my early work in labour economics addressed a variety of topics including the impact of manpower training programmes, sex discrimination in the labour market, the trade-union wage mark-up, unemployment duration, and women’s working lives. The publications on unemployment duration were joint with George Akerlof, my former PhD (1976) supervisor at Berkeley. George won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001.
Subsequent projects on the economics of personnel included work on boardroom succession, the effectiveness of boardroom subcommittees such as remuneration committees, negotiation, and the operation of financial instruments such as executive share options in aligning incentives. Some of my work in this area was joint with my Berkeley 91 classmate, Charles O’Reilly (now at Stanford University). In particular, we examined both social effects operating within the boardroom and tournament theory. In this period, I also developed a productive research relationship with what is now Willis-Towers-Watson, with work focusing on remuneration committees and the concept of “career shares”.
Recent work in this area has led me to examine the careers of female board directors. This work is summarised in two papers (2018, 2023) in the British Journal of Management investigating the prevalence of symbolic management and the phenomenon of the glass cliff as seen in the careers of women executives in UK boardrooms. All this work is joint with Ian Gregory-Smith (now at Newcastle University).
At the same time, I have also started looking at certain aspects of economic history including the lingering influence on the economy of phenomena such as historical ethnic violence, pandemics, and major social upheaval. These studies have been joint with Wen Hou, my colleague at Edinburgh University, and have led to publications in the Journal of Corporate Finance (2022, 2023), the Journal of Financial Intermediation (2025), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2024), among others.
In 1998 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and between 1995 and 2005 I was Director of the David Hume Institute.
Personal Website:
Has research links with:
- Department of Economics, University of Newcastle;
- Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, California;
- Department of Business Organization and Finance, Universidad de Murcia, Spain
Research Interests
- Labour Economics
- Top Executive Pay
- New Economics of Personnel