Peter Neary
Peter Neary is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Merton College Oxford. He has held full-time positions at Trinity College Dublin and at University College Dublin where he was Professor of Political Economy from 1980 to 2006. He is currently President of the Royal Economic Society.
Born in 1950 in Drogheda, Ireland, Peter Neary was educated at University College Dublin and Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. in 1978. He has been a post-doctoral Visiting Scholar at MIT and a Visiting Professor at Princeton, Berkeley, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario), the University of Ulster at Jordanstown, and the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He was an editor of the European Economic Review from 1986 to 1990 and has served on a number of other editorial boards. He was President of the European Economic Association in 2002, and played a leading role in establishing the Journal of the European Economic Association. He has lectured widely, including the 2002 Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, the 2008-2009 Graham Lecture at Princeton, and the 2015 Corden Lecture at the University of Melbourne.
Measuring the Restrictiveness of International Trade Policy by Jim Anderson and Peter Neary was published by MIT Press in 2005. Peter Neary has also edited three other books and published over a hundred professional papers. His main research field is international trade theory, where he has worked on short- to long-run adjustment, the economics of resource-rich economies (especially the "Dutch Disease"), trade and industrial policy, and the implications of imperfect competition (especially oligopoly) for trade and globalisation, among other topics. He has also written on consumer theory (including rationing and index numbers), industrial organisation (including the economics of research and development), and macroeconomics (including international macro theory and Irish economic policy).
In addition to his full-time position in Oxford, he is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Other professional activities and honours include the following:
- Fellow, Econometric Society, 1987.
- Member, Academia Europaea, 1989.
- President, Irish Economic Association, 1990-92.
- Member, Royal Irish Academy, 1997.
- Member, Scientific Committee of the European Trade Study Group, 1998-
- President, International Economics and Finance Society, 1999-2000.
- President, European Economic Association, 2002.
- International Research Fellow, Kiel Institute of World Economics, 2002.
- President, Section F (Economics), British Association for the Advancement of Science, 2005.
- Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Social Sciences, 2006.
- Fellow, British Academy, 2008.
- Fellow, CESifo Research Network, Munich, 2010.
- Chair, Economics Sub-Panel, UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), 2010-14.
- European Research Council Advanced Grant, 2012-17.
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GRAVITY WITHOUT APOLOGY: THE SCIENCE OF ELASTICITIES, DISTANCE AND TRADE
May 2020|Journal article|ECONOMIC JOURNAL -
IO for exports(s)
May 2020|Journal article|INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONHeterogeneous firms, Pass-Through, Quantifying effects of globalization, Super- and sub-convexity, Supermodularity -
South-North Trade in Ireland: Gravity and Firms from the Good Friday Agreement to Brexit
December 2019|Journal article|ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REVIEW -
SELECTION EFFECTS WITH HETEROGENEOUS FIRMS
August 2019|Journal article|JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
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Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Gravity without Apology: The Science of Elasticities, Distance, and Trade
March 2020|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesGravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the facts, noting the overwhelming evidence that trade tends to fall with distance. We then introduce some expository tools for understanding CES theories of gravity as a simple general-equilibrium system. Next, we point out some anomalies with the theory: mounting evidence against constant trade elasticities, and implausible predictions for bilateral trade balances. Finally, we sketch an approach based on subconvex gravity as a promising direction to resolving them.Bilateral Trade Balances, Brexit, Elasticity of Trade to Distance, Quantile Regression, Structural Gravity and Trade, Subconvex Demands -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
South-North Trade in Ireland: Gravity and Firms from the Good Friday Agreement to Brexit
November 2019|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesThis paper revisits the work of Fitzsimons, Hogan, and Neary (1999) on the level of trade between Ireland and Northern Ireland. In doing so, we reflect on the recent move to prominence of this issue since the referendum decision of the UK to leave the EU and also on the shift within the economics literature to looking at trade issues from a micro rather than a macro perspective as data availability has grown. Our country-level results show the same pattern of limited statistical significance for a border effect as was found in the earlier work still holds but when using firm-level data we find a positive and significant border effect. This effect holds for total trade at firm and product level with the primary determinant coming from the intensive margin, both in terms of average exports per firm and average exports per product within firms.Brexit, Gravity, Multi-Product Firms -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
IO FOR EXPORT(S)
February 2019|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesWe provide an overview and synthesis of recent work on models of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms in international trade, paying particular atten¬tion to pass-through, selection effects, competition effects, and matching endogenous with exogenous distributions. A recurring theme is that CES preferences are extremely convenient for deriving analytic results, but also extremely restrictive in their theoret-ical and empirical implications. We introduce the class of “constant-response demand functions” to describe some related families of demand functions that provide a unifying principle for much recent work that explores alternatives to CES demands.Heterogeneous Firms, Pass-Through, Quantifying Effects of Globalization, Super- and Sub-Convexity, Supermodularity -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
New Characteristics and Hedonic Price Index Numbers
January 2019|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesChanges in product characteristics on the extensive margin are an important and hitherto neglected dimension of quality change. Standard techniques for quality-adjusting price indices cannot handle such changes satisfactorily, which leads to an economically and statistically significant bias in the measurement of prices and real output. We combine theoretical insights from index numbers and demand for charac¬teristics to develop a new method for incorporating changes on the extensive charac¬teristic margin. Applied to data on new car sales in the U.K., our method leads to revisions in estimated inflation rates for this commodity group that are both plausible and quantitatively important.Extensive and Intensive Margins of Consumption, Characteristics Model, Quality Change, Sato-Vartia-Feenstra Index Numbers -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Choked by Red Tape? The Political Economy of Wasteful Trade Barriers
March 2018|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesAbstract Red-tape barriers (RTBs) are an important source of trade costs, but have received little scholarly attention. Here we take a first step toward a theory of RTBs, and show that their implications are very different from those of more traditional trade barriers. Our model highlights that RTBs have important impacts on the extensive margin of trade, and yields rich predictions on how changes in the political-economic environment and product characteristics affect RTBs. Taking into account the endogenous response of RTBs is crucial to understanding the impact of reductions in tariffs and natural trade costs on the extensive and intensive margins of trade, as well as on welfare. Moreover, the availability of RTBs affects in important ways the tariff commitments that are specified in a trade agreement.International trade policy, Non-Tari Measures, Political economy, Red tape barriers, Trade agreements