Annual Marshall Lecture by Prof. John Moore on Funding Horizons

Thu 13 October 2022 - Fri 14 October 2022

Lady Mitchell Hall

Prof. John Moore (University of Edinburgh and London School of Economics}
is simply one of the world’s top economic theorists, with seminal work relevant for both micro and macro -- his work being a perfect illustration of how this distinction is often artificial.

His contributions are many, but two lines of research come to mind as among his most prominent.

First, together with Oliver Hart (a Nobel Laureate for a research agenda comprising this), John has set some of the foundations of the modern theory of the firm, in particular the property rights approach, the incomplete-contract-based “Grossman-Hart-Moore theory”. The importance and relevance of this cannot be overstated, both for theory and for real-life applications (e.g. for privatization).

Second, in joint work with long-time collaborator Nobu Kiyotaki, they laid the groundwork for the so-called “financial accelerator” models of the business cycles -- a view based on financial frictions and “credit cycles” (the title of their core, most celebrated Journal of Political Economy paper in this vein, nearing 10K citations in Google scholar). This has been enormously influential for understanding (and thus finding the right policy prescriptions for) the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and the ensuing global recession. A large part of Macro is still about extending and applying those ideas to new contexts and without that work we would still be lost in the dark. Nobu and John keep working on those topics themselves and recently produced exciting and influential papers on liquidity, monetary policy, and business cycles.