Professor of Strategic Urban Management and Finance, School of Management, University of St Andrews

Duncan Maclennan is currently the UK ESRC’s Knowledge Leader on Devolution and City Deals and has had a career as an applied economist in both academia and government focussing on housing, infrastructure, neighbourhoods, cities and regions. He holds Chairs as Professor of Public Policy at the University of Glasgow and of Strategic Urban Management and Finance at the University of St Andrews as well as a visiting Chair at RMIT (Melbourne). He has previously held visiting chairs in the Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania) and in the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. His recent academic publications have been concerned with modelling regional house price cycles using a Markov switching technique, the role of housing wealth in Piketty’s evidence and models, the impact of housing outcomes on growth and productivity and the evolution of the Chinese housing system since the early 1990’s.

Duncan has spent ten years of his career working as an economist within government. He currently serves on the Economic Commission for Glasgow, and the Northern Housing Commission. He was special Adviser to the First Ministers of Scotland from 1999-2003 then spent the period 2004-2009 working abroad; first in Australia, as a Chief Economist and Deputy Secretary for Policy and Strategy in the Government of Victoria: and then Canada, as Chief Economist in the Federal Department for Infrastructure and Cities. He was the lead author of the Harcourt Report on Canada’s Cities and Communities, and then advised the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in New Zealand (2008, 2009) and served on the Australian Prime Minister’s Expert Advisory Panel on the Future Planning of Australian Cities (2010-12). He has also advised the World Bank and the EU.