John Vickers
Professor of Economics
All Souls College
Warden; All Souls College
01865 279379
Sir John Vickers has been Warden of All Souls College since October 2008. He studied PPE at Oxford University, where, after a period working in the oil industry, he taught economics and was Drummond Professor of Political Economy from 1991 to 2008. He was Chief Economist at the Bank of England and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee 1998-2000; Director General/Chairman of the Office of Fair Trading 2000-05; President of the Royal Economic Society 2007-10; Chair of the Independent Commission on Banking 2010-11; and President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (2018-). His research interests, which combine theory and policy, mainly concern competition and regulation.
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Discriminating against captive customers
December 2019|Journal article|American Economic Review: Insights -
The Case for Market-Based Stress Tests
October 2019|Journal article|Journal of Financial Regulation -
Safer, but Not Safe Enough
September 2019|Journal article|Journal of Risk and Financial Management<jats:p>The great divide between official analyses and economists’ views of optimal bank equity capital is not as wide as appears at first sight if the economics of risk is properly addressed. Adapting the BoE’s analysis to take account of abnormal risk conditions, a less benign view of the effectiveness of resolution regimes in systemic crisis, an international rather than domestic perspective, and a consistent approach to risk, takes one a good distance towards the economists’ view. The economic rationale for capital levels in the region of Basel III is left looking thin. It looks thinner still when, as now, price-to-book ratios are calling regulatory capital measures into question for some important banks</jats:p> -
Patterns of Competitive Interaction
June 2019|Journal articleBertrand-Edgeworth competition, Captive customers, Consideration sets, Mixed strategies, price dispersion
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Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Patterns of Competition with Captive Customers
December 2018|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesWe study mixed-strategy equilibrium pricing in oligopoly settings where con-sumers vary in the set of suppliers they consider for their purchase-some being captive to a particular firm, some consider two particular firms, and so on. In the case of "nested reach" we find equilibria, unlike those in more standard models, in which firms are ranked in terms of the prices they might charge. We character-ize equilibria in the three-firm case, and contrast them with equilibria in the parallel model with capacity constraints. A theme of the analysis is how patterns of consumer interaction with firms matter for competitive outcomes. -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Discriminating Against Captive Customers
October 2018|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesMark Armstrong, John Vickers We analyze a market where some consumers only consider buying from a specific seller while other consumers choose the best deal from several sellers. When sellers are able to discriminate against their captive customers, we show that discrimination harms consumers in aggregate relative to the situation with uniform pricing when sellers are approximately symmetric, while the practice tends to benefit consumers in sufficiently asymmetric markets. -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Direct welfare analysis of relative price regulation
June 2017|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesAbstract The paper synthesizes and develops the welfare analysis of regulating relative prices, for example price differences, of which banning price discrimination is a special case. Welfare results are derived directly by convexity arguments using functions of welfare levels. The method is also used to obtain results about e¤ects on consumer surplus.Price discrimination -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Which demand systems can be generated by discrete choice?
October 2014|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesWe provide a simple necessary and sufficient condition for when a multiproduct demand system can be generated from a discrete choice model with unit demands.Discrete choice, unit demand, multiproduct demand functions -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Some Economics of Banking Reform
November 2012|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesWhere do we stand, five years on from the start of the crisis, on progress towards banking reform? Major advances have been made, but a lot of unfinished business remains, notably on structural reform of banks. Following a stock-take of current reform initiatives, the paper reviews some economics of public policy towards banks, starting with the rationale for deposit guarantees and lender-of-last-resort support but concentrating on why governments feel compelled to provide solvency support in crisis. It then covers the economics of capital requirementsBanking, bail-outs, capital requirements, deposit guarantees, Glass-Steagall, resolution, ring-fencing, structural reform, Volcker rule