Mervyn King to join NYU as visiting professor

Sir Mervyn King, the former Bank of England governor, has accepted a visiting professorship at New York University.

Sir Mervyn stepped down from the helm of the UK central bank last month and will assume a position as an economics professor at NYU Stern School of Business in September. His appointment will be shared with the university’s law school.

“[His] experience at the Bank of England, encompassing his leadership through the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, will be a rich source of insight for the entire Stern community,” says Peter Henry, the school’s dean.

Stern currently counts three Nobel Prize winners among its faculty - Robert Engle, Michael Spence and Thomas Sargent, the 2011 laureate in economics.

Sir Mervyn returns to US academia having served as a visiting professor at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology early in his career. At MIT, he reportedly occupied the adjoining office to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Before becoming the Bank of England’s chief economist in 1991, Sir Mervyn taught at the London School of Economics, where he was a founder of its Financial Markets Group.

His ten-year tenure as governor of the Bank of England was defined by ultra-loose monetary policy, including the controversial policy of quantitative easing employed to fight the financial crisis.

In a recent interview, Sir Mervyn told the FT that he intends to avoid involvement in policy debates following his departure. “You just cannot appear to do anything which potentially makes life difficult for your successor,” he said.

The conferral of a life peerage in the House of Lords will, however, sustain his role in UK public life.

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/