UM Star Lecture: “Efficiency and its discontents”
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Much of today’s economic policy making is concerned with the notion of efficiency. Improving productivity, enhancing efficiency and stimulating innovation often appear to have become a goal in themselves, rather than a means to an end. But what is efficiency? Why should it matter? And is there evidence that it does matter for our prosperity, wellbeing and progress? In this lecture, I try to provide some answers to these questions, drawing upon my own experience advising policy makers in relation to the economic crisis, bank supervision and energy transition. The result is a discourse that is both critical of large parts of the economic profession but also of policy makers, and last but not least of us, the end consumers. I conclude by suggesting a slightly different use of the notion of efficiency, and explain why I think this alternative use of efficiency may be more ‘productive’ in the end…
Literaturhaus
Jaap Bos (PhD 2002, Maastricht) is an economist specializing in banking and growth empirics. He is currently Associate Professor of Finance at Maastricht University. His work has been published in the Journal of Business, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Banking and Finance.
His research interests include the role of productivity differences, spillovers and innovation in explaining economic growth, and the analysis of micro-developments in efficiency and competition.
From 2002 to 2004, while working at the Netherlands Central Bank, he was a member of the Basel II Research Task Force and co-author of the BIS background paper entitled ‘Studies on the Validation of Internal Rating Systems’.
In 2005, he was a guest editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance, editing a special issue on ‘Banking and Finance in an Integrating Europe’, with Klaas Knot (Ministry of Finance) and Clemens Kool (Utrecht University).
Together with Jacob Bikker (Netherlands Central Bank), he published “Bank Performance” (Routledge, 2008), a theoretical and empirical framework for the analysis of profitability, competition and efficiency.
In 2009, he was a member of the research team that investigated the credit crisis for Dutch parliament as part of a parliamentary investigation.
Jaap Bos is listed by IDEAS/Repec as one of its top authors in the field of efficiency and productivity.