Economics in the Time of COVID-19
citizens,^3 have confidence that the government will do what is required? One lesson
of coronavirus may be never put into power politicians who have a habit of ignoring
experts.
References
Darby, J, J Ireland, C Leith and S Wren-Lewis (1998), “COMPACT: a rational
expectations, intertemporal model of the United Kingdom economy”, Economic
Modelling 16(1): 1-52.
Keogh‐Brown, M R, S Wren‐Lewis, W J Edmunds, P Beutels and R D Smith (2009),
“The possible macroeconomic impact on the UK of an influenza pandemic”, Health
Economics 19(11).
About the author
Simon Wren-Lewis is a Professor at Oxford University and a Fellow of Merton
College. He began his career as an Economist in H.M.Treasury. In 1981 he moved to
the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, where as a Senior Research
Fellow he constructed the first versions of the world model NIGEM. From 1988-1990,
as Head of Macroeconomic Research, he supervised development of this and the
Institute’s domestic model. During this period he published with colleagues a study
suggesting that an entry rate of 1.95 DM/£ into the ERM was too high, which at the
time was a minority view. In 1990 he became a Professor at Strathclyde University, and
built the UK econometric model COMPACT. From 1995 to 2006 he was a Professor at
Exeter University.
He has published papers on macroeconomics in a wide range of academic journals
including the Economic Journal, European Economic Review, and American Economic
Review. He also wrote one of the background papers for the Treasury’s 2003 assessment
of its five economic tests for joining EMU and advised the Bank of England on the
development of its new macromodel. His current research focuses on the analysis
of monetary and fiscal policy in small calibrated macromodels, and on equilibrium
exchange rates.
3 https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/trump-says-the-coronavirus-is-the-democrats-new-hoax.html