John Cable

Emeritus Professor of Economics

Contact

Email: joc@aber.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1970 62 2500

Biography

John Cable has a BA in Industrial Economics from Nottingham University, an MA (Econ) from Manchester and a Warwick PhD. After graduating from Nottingham he worked briefly in the Economics and Statistics department at Unilever head office in London before taking up his first academic appointment in economics at Manchester. He later moved to the University of Warwick, where he was Chairman (Head) of Economics in the early 1980s. Before coming to Aberystwyth he also held visiting appointments at the International Institute of Management of the Science Center Berlin and at Loughborough University, and he also visited the European University Institute in Florence. At Aberystwyth he was head of the Department of Economics in the mid 1990s before the formation of the School of Management and Business, in which he served as Research Director from its inception until his retirement.

In the early and mid 1990s John was a Council member of the Economic and Social Research Council, vice-chairman of its Research Resources Board and Director of its Functioning of Markets research programme. At various times he has served as advisor or consultant to the Office of Fair Trading, the Registrar of Restrictive Practices, the UN Center on Transnational Corporations, the Department of Trade and Industry, and the former National Economic Development Office, Prices and Incomes Board, and Ministry of Technology. He is a member of Aberystwyth University Court.

John has co-authored books with Keith Cowling and others on the Economic Effects of Advertising and of Mergers, and published many additional papers and book contributions in these areas. He also co-authored an earlier monograph on Workshop Wage Determination with the late Shirley Lerner, and contributed the chapter on ‘Industry and Commerce’ in the first eleven editions of Prest and Coppock’s The UK Economy.  In 1993 he edited a volume on Current Issues in Industrial Economics, subsequently translated into a number a languages including Chinese.

His research publications cover a range of other topics, including the economics of divisionalisation, and in particular of M-form organisation in the UK, Germany and Japan; the bank-industry relationship in West Germany; the productivity effects of employee participation and profit sharing; quit rates;  the relation between union wage and profitability effects; event study methodology; and an application of event-study to allegations of a ‘winner’s curse’ in the UK third-generation mobile telephone licence auction. He has also worked on oligopoly and welfare, and on the role of market entry and exit in the competitive process, and he devised and introduced a new measure of market share mobility. Most recently he proposed, with Richard Jackson and others, a new, structural time series approach to the analysis of the persistence of profits amongst firms.