A past Wheeler Institute event with Thomas Philippon, chaired by Hélène Rey and in conversation with Martin Wolf. To find out more about this event, please read our summary , ‘How power dynamics and competition is impacting economies and consumers across the globe,’ by George Looker.
Professor Thomas Philippon, Stern School of Business NYU, discussed his latest publication The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, where he argues that many key problems of the American economy are due not to the flaws of capitalism or the inevitabilities of globalisation but to the concentration of corporate power.
The talk was chaired by Hélène Rey, Lord Raj Bagri Professor of Economics at London Business School and in conversation with Martin Wolf CBE, Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, London. The audience Q &A session was moderated by LBS Department of Economics Assistant Professor Joseba Martinez.
Read Martin Wolf’s review of Thomas Philippon’s book in the Financial Times [paywall].
Thomas Philippon is the Max L. Heine Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He was named one of the top 25 economists under 45 by the IMF and won the Bernácer Prize for Best European Economist. He currently serves as an academic advisor to the Financial Stability Board and to the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research. He was previously an advisor to the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a board member of the French prudential regulatory authority.
Martin Wolf is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 for services to financial journalism. He was a member of the UK government’s Independent Commission on Banking between June 2010 and September 2011.
Mr Wolf has honorary doctorates from the London School of Economics, Nottingham University, Warwick University and Kingston University, in the UK, Macquarie University, in Australia and KU Leuven, in Belgium. He is an honorary fellow of Corpus Christ College and Nuffield College, Oxford University, and of King’s College, London.
Mr Wolf won the Ludwig Erhard Prize for economic commentary for 2009 and “Commentariat of the Year 2009” at the Comment Awards, sponsored by Editorial Intelligence. He was placed 15th in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in December 2009 and 37th in the same list for 2010. He was joint winner of the 2009 award for columns in “giant newspapers” at the 15th annual Best in Business Journalism competition of The Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the 33rd Ischia International Journalism Prize in 2012, the Overseas Press Club of America’s prize for “best commentary on international news in any medium” for 2013 and the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Gerald Loeb Awards.
Hélène Rey, OBE, FBA is the Lord Raj Bagri Professor of Economics at London Business School. Until 2007, she was at Princeton University, as Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Economics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School.
Professor Rey is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Econometric Society and of the European Economic Association. She is on the board of the Review of Economic Studies and associate editor of the AEJ: Macroeconomics Journal. She is a CEPR Research Fellow and an NBER Research Associate. She is a member of the Haut Conseil de Stabilité Financière (French Macro Prudential Authority), of the Commission Economique de la Nation and of the Bellagio Group on the international economy.
Her research focuses on the determinants and consequences of external trade and financial imbalances, the theory of financial crises and the organisation of the international monetary system. She demonstrated in particular that countries gross external asset positions help predict current account adjustments and the exchange rate.
In 2005 she was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. She received the 2006 Bernácer Prize (best European economist working in macroeconomics and finance under the age of 40). In 2012 she received the inaugural Birgit Grodal Award of the European Economic Association honoring a European-based female economist who has made a significant contribution to the Economics profession. In 2013 she received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award (European economist under 45 years old who has made a contribution in theoretical and applied research that is significant to economics in Europe), shared with Thomas Piketty.
Currently, Professor Rey was formerly one of the Academic Directors of the AQR Asset Management Institute at LBS. She was a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Economique until 2012, on the Board of the Board of the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (2010-2014). She writes a regular column for the French newspaper Les Echos.
Hélène Rey received her undergraduate degree from ENSAE, a Master in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University and her PhDs from the London School of Economics and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.