Professor Tim Besley

Director of STICERD, School Professor of Economics and Political Science and W Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics, and CEP Associate

Expertise: public economics, development economics, political economics

Telephone:

+44 (0)20 7955 6702

Email:

t.besley@lse.ac.uk

Room:

32L 3.37

Assistant:

Irina Zaraisky

Email:

i.zaraisky@lse.ac.uk

Connect:

Website

Links:

Development
Psychology and Economics
Economics of Environment and Energy

Biography

Professor Tim Besley's current research interests are:

Public Economics
Development Economics
Political Economics

Tim's latest projects include:

Latest

Upcoming: Economics of Environment and Energy Seminar

TBC

25 November 2021

Tim Besley (EOPP, LSE)

A sense of mutual obligation means that even the rich should see the point of paying their taxes

01 October 2021

Timothy Besley

Creating a strong sense of reciprocity between the state and its citizens makes it more likely they will pay taxes willingly, says Timothy Besley (LSE). As we emerge from a pandemic that emphasised the importance of mutu... Read more...

Blog

State capacity and development clusters

18 June 2021

Timothy Besley, Chris Dann and Torsten Persson

The determinants of economic development have been debated for many years. However, some of these determinants have been hard to measure internationally. Tim Besley, Chris Dann and Torsten Persson review evidence from 25... Read more...

Blog

Free media help combat the spread of COVID-19

22 July 2020

Timothy Besley and Sacha Dray

What is the best response to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? Although some success stories and key lessons are emerging (early response, large-scale testing, effective containment), countries have adopted a s... Read more...

Blog

Measuring the impact of malfunctioning credit markets on productivity

09 March 2020

Timothy Besley, Isabelle Roland and John Van Reenen

Since the Global Crisis, there has been a renewed awareness of how frictions in credit markets can damage economic efficiency due to a higher cost of capital and/or capital being misallocated away from its most productiv... Read more...

CEP discussion papers

The aggregate consequences of default risk: evidence from firm-level data

21 January 2020

Timothy Besley, Isabelle Roland and John Van Reenen

This paper studies the implications of perceived default risk for aggregate output and productivity. Using a model of credit contracts with moral hazard, we show that a firm’s probability of default is a sufficient stati... Read more...

STICERD Public Events and Lectures

Amartya Sen Lecture: Foundations of State Effectiveness

13 March 2019

Tim Besley (EOPP, LSE)

CEP reports

UK growth: a new chapter

02 February 2017

Philippe Aghion, Terra Allas, Timothy Besley, John Browne, Francesco Caselli, Richard Davies, Richard Lambert, Rachel Lomax, Stephen Machin, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Christopher A. Pissarides, Isabelle Roland, Xavier Rolet, Nicholas Stern and Anna Valero

The UK Economy is at a critical juncture. Leaving the EU creates economic challenges that necessitate widespread policy change. But this also generates an opportunity to tackle some of the long-standing challenges which ... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Choice and Competition in Public Service Provision

16 August 2016

Timothy Besley and James M. Malcolmson

In spite of a range of policy initiatives in sectors such as education, health care and legal services, whether choice and competition is valuable remains contested territory. This paper studies the impact of choice and ... Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers

Aspirations and the Political Economy of Inequality

16 August 2016

Timothy Besley

In standard approaches to the political economy of inequality, the income distribution and the preferences of households are taken as fixed when studying how incomes are determined within and between nations. This paper ... Read more...

Related Events

Sir William Arthur Lewis Chair in Development Economics Inaugural Lecture: Political Economy and Development: a Progress Report

10 February 2016

Tim Besley (EOPP, LSE)

Development Discussion Papers

Profit with Purpose? A Theory of Social Enterprise with Experimental Evidence

08 November 2013

Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak

When social benefits cannot be measured, a hybrid organization which selects managers based on motivation can be used to balance profi…ts with a social purpose. This paper develops a model of social enterprise based on s... Read more...

Books

Investing for Prosperity

01 September 2013

Timothy Besley and John Van Reenen

Why is economic growth such a rare and elusive butterfly in the UK garden? What institutions and policies are needed to sustain UK economic growth in the dynamic global economy of the twenty-first century? After years ... Read more...