Rachel Griffith


Rachel Griffith CBE FBA is a British-American academic and educator. She is professor of economics at the University of Manchester and a research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Griffith was president of the European Economic Association for 2015, making her the first woman to hold the position. She was also joint managing editor of The Economic Journal between 2011 and 2017.

Citizenship

Griffith holds both UK and US citizenship.

Biography

Griffith earned her degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, her M.Sc. in econometrics and forecasting from City of London Polytechnic, and her PhD from the University of Keele. Griffith is currently the Research Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She was elected President of the Royal Economic Society in 2018. She will be President from 2019-2020. She served as Deputy Chair of the Economics sub-Panel of the Research Excellence Framework. Griffith's main area of focus is now related to empirical industrial organization regarding the retail food sector and nutrition. Currently, she has her second ERC Advanced Grant to study behavior of consumers and firms to see how government policy will impact food markets.

Research

Obesity

Griffith's presidential address to the European Economic Association at the University of Mannheim, Germany entitled "Gluttony and Sloth? Labour Market Nonseparabilities and the Rise in Obesity", reflected her recent research into the relationship between changes in relative food prices and the nutritional quality of households’ shopping baskets.

Corporation tax

In her Royal Economic Society Public Lecture 2015, "Does Starbucks Pay Enough Tax", Griffith argued that corporate tax should be charged like VAT. Griffith stated that the current system of corporate taxation is outdated and taxing corporate profits in the location where value is created is not very meaningful. She suggested taxing profits at the destination of sales rather than at the source of profits would be an improvement. Griffith cited two papers, one by Auerbach and Devereux, the other by Devereux and Vella, in support of her case. Griffith's previous research in this area considers how influential corporate income taxes are in determining where firms choose to legally own intellectual property, i.e. the way in which intellectual property accounts for firms' assets and if they can be used by firms to shift income offshore to reduce their corporate income tax liability.

Honours and Fellowships

1990–1999
2000–2004
2005–2009
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2010–2014
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2015 onwards