Stephen Smith is a Professor of Economics at University College London.

He is a graduate of the Universities of Oxford (BA), Manchester (MA(Econ)), and London (PhD). He worked for eight years (1977-1985) as a member of the Government Economic Service at the UK Department of Trade and Industry. In 1985 he joined the staff of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research institute specialising in the economic analysis of taxation and public finance. He was Deputy Director of IFS from 1990 to 1997.

Stephen Smith first joined UCL part-time in 1990, to teach a course on Environmental Policy for the MSc in Environmental and Resource Economics, founded by Professor David Pearce, and he taught successive generations of students on this degree programme for nearly 20 years. He has recently distilled some of the key ideas from his teaching into a short book for non-specialists, “Environmental Economics. A Very Short Introduction”, published in 2011 by Oxford University Press.

Stephen Smith joined UCL full-time as Professor of Economics in 1997, and was head of the Economics Department from 1997 to 2002. He has been closely involved in the development of teaching and research on Public Policy at UCL, initiating UCL’s multi-disciplinary MSc programme in Public Policy in 1996, and teaching the economics component of this programme for a number of years. From 2008 to 2013 he was Executive Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences.

Stephen Smith has acted as a consultant to a number of government departments and international organisations including HM Treasury, DEFRA, the UK Environment Agency, European Environment Agency, the OECD, the European Commission, and the IMF.