Matthew Watson
Professor of Political Economy and ESRC Professorial Fellow, University of Warwick
Conservative Fantasies of ‘the Market’
Matthew Watson - 11 July 2019The UK Chancellor Philip Hammond recently declared (surprisingly for a Conservative party politician) that ‘the market’ is currently failing fairness tests in the distributional outcomes it is producing in the UK. Yet, his solution saw him quickly restored to partisan type, idealising textbook market institutions and setting as the future goal returning to the way market outcomes are “supposed to” operate.
Economic uncertainty and economics imperialism
Matthew Watson - 26 October 2017The question of why uncertainty does not feature more prominently as an economic ontology requires answers that are rooted in intellectual history. This post, the sixth in our series on uncertainty, searches for them by looking at how economic history has become increasingly colonised by economic theory, and economic theory by mathematics.
Paul Romer on mathiness and orthodox economics methodology
Matthew Watson - 16 September 2015Recent criticisms of the mathiness of many economists has raised the question within the blogosphere of whether a fundamental fault-line has now punctured economics orthodoxy
The two sides of speaking up for business
Matthew Watson - 10 March 2015Business executives will continue to tell us how to cast our votes in May’s general election, but, before being persuaded, check the evidence on both sides of the argument
The false promise of corporation tax cuts
Matthew Watson - 04 November 2014Recent research suggests that such policies constitute hand-outs, rather than effective means to shape firms’ investment decisions
In fear of Flash Crashes: stock market wobbles past and present
Matthew Watson - 19 June 2014The new era of high-frequency trading threatens our future prosperity
The Nobel Prize and the reproduction of economics orthodoxy
Matthew Watson - 30 October 2013This year’s economics laureates reflect the narrow purview of the prize and the entrenchment of familiar but limited ways of thinking about economic life