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Please note that the seminars are in-person only and not streamed or recorded.
Monday 2 March 2026, 5.00pm – 6.45pm
Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre, St Antony’s College
Current Members of Parliament and St Antony’s College Visiting Parliamentary Fellows The Rt Hon Damian Hinds MP and Ms Stella Creasy MP present the next in this insightful seminar series:
How are governments going to pay to make 19th century institutions fit to deal with 21st century problems?
Governments are spending a lot of money, including on debt interest, but most reforms cost money and society needs to pay for them. How and what consequences does this have for government planning.
Speakers:
Paul started as Provost of The Queen’s College Oxford in August 2025.
Before that he was director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies for 15 years, following periods as chief economist at the Department for Education and director of public spending at HM Treasury.
He is a columnist for The Times, and is a regular contributor to other broadcast and print media. He is a visiting professor at UCL and at York University.
Paul published the Sunday Times bestseller Follow the Money in 2023. He was for 11 years a member of the UK Climate Change Committee, and has served on the council of the ESRC and of the Royal Economic Society.
Paul has also for the last five years been helping to lead the IFS Deaton review of inequalities, and will be lead author of a book based on this study which is due to be published in 2026.
Nick Macpherson is Chairman of C Hoare & Co, Britain’s oldest bank, and of the Scottish American Investment Company. He is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and sits as a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords. He was Permanent Secretary to H M Treasury from 2005 to 2016, serving three Chancellors and leading the department through the financial and wider economic crisis which began in 2007. Prior to becoming Permanent Secretary, he ran the spending and tax sides of the Treasury. In the mid 1990s, he was Principal Private Secretary to Kenneth Clarke and Gordon Brown.
Michael McMahon is Professor of Economics at University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at St Hugh’s College. He previously worked at Warwick University and has also taught courses at INSEAD, NYU, Chicago Booth, Stanford, LBS and LSE. He has delivered capacity building courses throughout Asia with the IMF’s Singapore Training Institute. He worked at the Bank of England for many years. Between April 2019 and December 2025, he served as a Council member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, including a period as Chair of the Council.
He is a research fellow of the CEPR and was Director of their Research Policy Network on Central Bank Communication. He was Deputy Director of Nuffield Centre for Applied Macro Policy (NuCaMP). He was also affiliated with LSE’s Centre for Macroeconomics where he previously co-edited the CfM Survey. He was a member of the Royal Economic Society (RES) Council, and served as the Conference Secretary on the Executive Committee. He previously served as Deputy Programme Chair for the 2017 RES Annual Conference. He was an Economics Network advisory board member (2006-2011), Treasurer of the MMF Research Group (2016-2018) and was previously Director of Impact at CAGE, Warwick (2016-2019).
His interests lie in macroeconomics of monetary economics, fiscal policy, business cycles, inventories and applied econometrics. A key feature of his recent research is the use of interdisciplinary, data science techniques to understand communication and deliberation in central banks. His research has been published in journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics and numerous others.
He holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from Trinity College Dublin, and MSc, MRes, and PhD degrees in Economics from the London School of Economics.