Professor Wendy Carlin
Professor at University College of London
Biography
Wendy Carlin FBA is Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at UCL, Research Fellow of the CEPR and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research is on macroeconomics, institutions and economic performance, the economics of transition, and evolution of economic research and education. Her fourth macroeconomics book subtitled ‘Institutions, instability, and inequality’ co-authored with David Soskice was published in 2024. She is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the Office for Budget Responsibility. She leads the CORE Econ project, which is changing economics education around the world www.core-econ.org and is co-director of the Stone Centre on Wealth Concentration, Inequality and the Economy at UCL. She was awarded a CBE for services to economics and public finance, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as Fellow of the British Academy. She is Vice President of the International Economic Association.
Civil society comes of age in economics: governance beyond markets and states
A substantial shift in the focus of economic research over the last half century has largely gone unnamed and unnoticed. Using topic modelling on 27,436 research papers published in top economics journals since 1900, we document a trajectory from ‘state’ to ‘market’ topics and then, from 1970 towards ‘civil society’, including firms as organizations, families, neighbourhood communities, trade unions, social movements and identity groups. In civil society, the primary mechanisms regulating economic interactions are neither governmental fiat nor complete contracts and market-determined prices but instead are hierarchies of private authority and power, social norms, group identity (including out-group hostility), and reputation. We characterize the comparative advantage of the three forms of governance and complementarities among them in addressing societal coordination problems.