About me

Hello, my name is Benjamin Mitra-Kahn. I am currently the economic advisor at the UK Intellectual Property Office and have recently completed my Ph.D. in economics at City University London called Redefining the Economy: A history of economics and national accounting. I am also in the process of finishing my second Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research on empirical modelling and development, which I hope to have awarded this summer.

Welcome to my virtual home where you will find the papers I have written, updates on work in progress and my writing generally (under the Home tab) and a digital copy of my CV. The sub-menu breaks down any updates by fields which are drawn from all the papers and other work.

This year has been very active one for me, with the UK government’s economic review of intellectual property taking up a lot of time and interest. This was a report commissioned by the Prime Minister and delivered by Ian Hargreaves in May 2011 with a lot of economic input. It lead to a very nice thank you on the conclusion pages to our team and a short co-authored paper ”Approaches to evidence on IPRs, competition and innovation” (with Tony Clayton) which was delivered with the IP Review - Digital Opportunity.

Blogging has also become more a staple as  the History of Economics Playground blog joined forces with George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), giving a lot of interesting exposure and getting me to both Bretton Woods and Berlin for INET conferences. I have handed all the reins over for the New School Economic Review to the new generation of graduate students, and the latest issue entitled “What is Economics” is a great publication.

Academically things have been switched up a bit, with a publication in the Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues on “Copyright, Evidence and Lobbynomics: The world after the UK’s Hargreaves Review” and being asked to review papers for the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Oxford Economic Papers and a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology. There is still a serious backlog of papers from my dissertations which I need to send to editors, or review for re-submission, and new work on patent thickets, patent backlogs and copyright issues in progress – so there is enough to do.

If you have any questions, ideas, thoughts or criticisms, feel free to get in touch on benjamin@mitrakahn.com or pop a comment in the relevant post.

-Benjamin Mitra-Kahn, 22 April 2012, London