Biography
John Spencer joined the staff in the Department of Economics in Queen’s in 1964. In 1965 he was awarded a Henry Fellowship and Fulbright Grant to spend a year at Yale University, where he was a visitor to the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. He took up a lectureship at the LSE in 1969 and then came back to Ireland to a post in the New University of Ulster, where he was appointed Professor in 1971 and, later, Dean of Social Sciences. In 1985, he returned to Queen’s as Professor of Economics, remaining there until his retirement in 2004. During this time, he was Head of Social Sciences for 13 years.
Among his research interests are (a) Financial Institutions, especially Building Societies, Savings and Loan Associations and Credit Unions; (b) Statistics and Econometrics, including the analysis of statistical ratios particularly the R/s statistic; and (c) Computable General Equilibrium, a technique to trace the effects of policy changes through an economic system. He also worked on various aspects of the Irish Economies, including agriculture and was the main biographer of the Irish statistician RC Geary.
John's early studies of Financial Institutions were amongst the first to estimate the underlying relationships as a stochastically dependent system. His research, with Denis Conniffe, on stochastic ratios included analysis of the maximum and range of partial sums of random variables and the moments of ratios of certain statistics. His work on Computable General Equilibrium, with Marcus Miller, was the first to use the newly discovered Scarf algorithm to calculate the economic effects of the UK joining the EEC in the early 1970s. This study modelled the effects of a restructuring of taxes and tariffs in the UK and the concurrent abandonment of Commonwealth Preference.
These topics account for many of his publications and his work appears in the National Institute Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Econometrica, International Economic Review, American Statistician, Review of Social Economy, The Statistician, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, and others. His work on the local economies included editing and contributing to a book on the economy of Northern Ireland and a book on the Irish economies, an early example, the first since partition, of a detailed study on the interaction and comparison of the two Irish economies.
When the Irish Economic Association was founded in 1986, he was honoured to be its first President. He was a member of the Statistical Council of the Taoiseach during its life, 1984-85, a group which was designed to advise the Taoiseach on Irish national statistics. In 1996 he was invited to give the Centenary Geary lecture. He was a member of the ESRC Research College (Economics, Politics, Geography) from 1997-2000 and was external examiner to many universities in Great Britain and Ireland over his career.