Timothy Besley

Timothy Besley is Professor of Economics and Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Director of the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) at the LSE.  He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).  He was educated at Oxford University where he became a Prize Fellow of All Souls College.  He subsequently taught at Princeton University before being appointed as Professor at the LSE in 1995.  His professional honours include being a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a British Academy Research Reader. In 2007, he was named an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Economic Association. In 2011 he was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Prof. Besley is a past Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and a past Managing Editor of the Economic Journal.  He currently serves on the editorial boards of numerous other professional journals.  He is an elected member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society, the Econometric Society, and the European Economics Association.  He has been a frequent consultant to the World Bank and is currently a consultant to HM Treasury.  From 2006-9, he was an External Member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.

Prof. Besley's work focuses mainly on issues in Development Economics, Public Economics and Political Economy. He has published widely on a variety of topics, mainly with a policy focus. His latest book Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters and will be published by Princeton University Press in August 2011 (co-authored with Torsten Persson).