Tim Besley

Infobox Officeholder
honorific-prefix =
name = Tim Besley
honorific-suffix =


imagesize =
small

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order2 =
office2 = Member of the Monetary Policy Committee
term_start2 = September 2006
term_end2 =
governor2 = Mervyn King
birth_date =
alma_mater = University of Oxford
profession = Economist

Timothy J. Besley has served on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee from September 2006 to present and is Kuwait professor of economics and political science at the London School of Economics and Director of the Suntory-Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Discpilines (STICERD) at the LSE.

He is also a research fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Institutions, Organizations and Growth Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2005, he won the Yrjö Jahnsson Award for European economics. This is the most pretigious award in European Economics and is made every second year to an economist under the age of 45 who has made significant contribution to economics in Europe.

His career began as a prize fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He then served as an assistant Professor at Princeton University before returning to the UK in 1995.

His consultancies include the European Commission, World Bank and Her Majesty's Treasury.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and is a foreign honorary member of the American Economic Association. He is a past co-editor of American Economic Review -- the first person to serve in this position not based at a US university. He is president-elect of the European Economic Association.

He attended Aylesbury Grammar School. He then studied at Oxford University, where he gained a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1st Class) and an M.Phil and a D.Phil in Economics.

His research interests are focused on aspects of economic policy formation in developed and emerging market economies. He is one of the leading economists involved in restoring the study of political economy to prominence in mainstream economics.

He is married to Gillian Paull and has two sons.