Leading Irish academic Philip Lane, the Government’s nomination for governor of the Central Bank, has acted as a consultant for several major global financial institutions.
He is currently Whately professor of political economy at Trinity College Dublin having joined the university in July 1997.
Prior to that, he worked as assistant professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University in the United States for two years.
Prof Lane was educated at TCD where he received a BA (Mod) in economics before going on to complete a PhD in economics at Harvard University.
He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and has consulted for the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Commission, European Central Bank, Asian Development Bank, OECD and a number of national central banks and other policy organisations.
In a paper entitled The Irish Crisis in February 2011, Prof Lane sought to explain the origins of the economic collapse in Ireland, provide an interim assessment of the Irish government's management of the crisis, and evaluate the lessons from Ireland for the macroeconomics of monetary unions.
In the paper, he said the “triple-track strategy” of the 2008 bank guarantee, the provision of extra capital for the banking system later that year, and the establishment of Nama had “an internal coherence” even if the execution of the strategy “turned out to be quite problematic in several respects”.
He also said the “primary responsibility” for curbing excesses lay with domestic policymakers, and there was a “twin failure” with the financial regulator losing control of systemic financial risk, while fiscal policy was “insufficiently counter-cyclical”.
He said a primary lesson from the Irish crisis at a domestic level is that it “reaffirmed the principle that rigorous discipline in fiscal policy and financial regulation is essential if membership of a currency union is to be compatible with macroeconomic and banking stability”.
At an EU level, the Irish crisis highlighted “the costs of the incomplete institutional design of the monetary union and the importance of deep level reforms both to reduce the probability of future crises and to increase the resilience of the European banking system in the event of a crisis”.
Prof Lane also spent a number of years as a director of the Institute for International Integration Studies at TCD before it closed down in April.
As well as being a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), he is a member of its steering group for the macroeconomics of global interdependence working group.
His research interests include financial globalisation, macroeconomics of exchange rates and capital flows, macroeconomic policy design, European Monetary Union, and the Irish economy.
He is also a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the EURO-50 group, and the scientific advisory committee of CEPII.
He was managing editor of the academic journal Economic Policy from 2009-2015, as well as the Economic and Social Review from 2004-2006.
He has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of European Economic Association, International Journal of Central Banking, Open Economies Review and Moneda y Credito.
In 2001, he was the inaugural recipient of the German Bernacer Award in Monetary Economics, awarded for outstanding contribution to monetary economics by European economists under 40.
