Alan Shipman is a senior lecturer in economics at the Open University. He returned to research and teaching on the economy after it crashed in 2008, having (mis)spent years as an emerging-markets analyst, consultant and business journalist. Lucky enough to have been taught economics at a time when macroeconomics didn’t require optimising ‘microfoundations’, and it was still permissible to ask what ‘capital’ means in macro models.

His current research is on the transmission of ideas in the economy and policymaking, economic elites, and secondhand markets. Other active interests in Chinese multinational business, and ‘eventisation’ of cultural production.