Our Team – The Cobden Centre

The Cobden Centre’s executive team and Senior Fellows. Our Advisory Board may be found here.

Daniel Hannan Trustee Daniel Hannan is an author and columnist. He succeeded in abolishing his position as an MEP after 21 years. He is President of the Initiative for Free Trade, a Visiting Professor at the University of Francisco Marroquín and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Winchester. He is the author of nine books, including New York Times bestseller ‘Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World’, and Sunday Times bestseller ‘Vote Leave’. His latest book is ‘What Next: How to get the best from Brexit’.
Dr. Anthony J. Evans Founding Fellow Anthony J. Evans (B.A., Liverpool; M.A., George Mason; PhD., George Mason) is Assistant Professor of Economics at ESCP Europe. He is the co-author of The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe: Economic Ideas in the Transition from Communism. He has been published in journals such as The Review of Austrian Economics, Eastern European Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, Economic Affairs and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and has featured in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. He has written numerous trade journal articles and pens opinion editorials for Guardian Unlimited. He has also authored policy papers for the Conservative Party, European Investment Fund, Financial Reporting Council and the Competition Commission on a range of market-process issues. Evans lives in Hertfordshire with his wife.
Max Rangeley Trustee and Manager Max Rangeley is the CEO of ReboundTAG Ltd, which produces microchip luggage tags and has been showcased by Lufthansa and featured on BBC World among other media outlets. Max has a Master’s in economics, following this he was given a scholarship to do a PhD at the London School of Economics, but decided instead to go straight into business. He has a particular interest in private currencies, especially the ways in which modern digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, could affect the business cycle. Friedrich von Hayek’s works on private currencies have been a major influence on his thinking in this area.
Professor Kevin Dowd Senior Fellow Professor Kevin Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the Cobden Centre and a long-standing free market economist whose main work has been on free banking and unregulated monetary systems. Over the years, he has written extensively on the history and theory of free banking, the mechanics of monetary systems without the state and the failings of central banking and financial regulation. His books on these subjects include Private Money: The Path to Monetary Stability (IEA, 1988), The State and the Monetary System (Philip Allan, 1989), Competition and Finance: A New Interpretation of Financial and Monetary Economics (Macmillan, 1996) and Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking (Routledge, 2000). He has current or past affiliations with the CATO Institute (Washington), the Independent Institute (Oakland, CA), the Open Republic Institute (Dublin), the Freedom Organization for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST), the Institute of Economic Affairs (London) and the Pensions Institute (London), as well as with the Libertarian Alliance (London). Over the last ten years or so, he has worked primarily on financial risk, pensions and insurance, and has recently worked on a book concerning the current financial crisis and the lessons to be drawn from it. Up until recently he held the chair in financial risk management at Nottingham University Business School, where worked in the Centre for Risk and Insurance Studies. He lives in Sheffield with his wife and their two daughters.
Dr. Tim Evans Senior Fellow Dr. Tim Evans is a former President and Director General of the Centre for the New Europe (2002-2005) in Brussels. Between 1993 and early 2002 he was the Executive Director of Public Affairs at the Independent Healthcare Association in London where he oversaw the political affairs and public relations of the UK’s independent health and social care providers. In that role he was widely credited as being the major driving force behind the ‘2000 Concordat’ which was described by the Financial Times as the most “historic deal in 50 years of British healthcare”. Prior to that, in 1991-1992, he was the Chief Economic and Political Adviser to the Slovak Prime Minister – Dr. Jan Carnogursky – and was Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit. In the late 1980s he was the Assistant Director of the Foundation for Defence Studies. Today, as well as working with The Cobden Centre, he is the Chairman of the Economic Policy Centre, Chairman of Global Health Futures Ltd, a Consultant Director and a Senior Fellow with the Adam Smith Institute. In 1993, he was awarded his PhD from the London School of Economics and in 2011 gained an MBA. A political sociologist specialising in economics, he has taught at a number of academic institutions over the years including teaching post-graduate students Social Policy at London’s Guildhall University and the Economics and Politics of the Future on the Strategic Command Course of Britain’s national Police Staff College at Bramshill. In 2007 he was made a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. A regular commentator on television and radio, his articles have appeared in the Guardian, Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal Europe and a host of other newspapers around the world. The author of numerous books, monographs and articles he has been published by think tanks that include the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for the New Europe, Fabian Society, Institute of Economic Affairs, Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Jamie Whyte Senior Fellow Jamie Whyte was born in New Zealand and educated at the University of Auckland and then the University of Cambridge in England, where he gained a Ph.D. in philosophy. Jamie remained at Cambridge for a further three years, as a fellow of Corpus Christi College and a lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty. During this time he published a number of academic articles on the nature of truth, belief and desire, and won the Analysis Essay Competition for the best article by a philosopher under the age of 30. Jamie then joined Oliver Wyman & Company, a London-based strategy consulting firm specialising in the financial services industry, for which he still works, as the Head of Research and Publications. Jamie has published two books: Crimes Against Logic (McGraw Hill, Chicago, 2004) and A Load of Blair (Corvo, London, 2005). Jamie is a regular contributor of opinion articles to The Times (of London), the Financial Times and Standpoint magazine . In 2006 he won the Bastiat Prize for journalism.
Detlev Schlichter Senior Fellow Detlev S. Schlichter is a writer and Austrian School economist. He had a 19-year career in financial markets as a derivatives trader and investment manager during which he worked for J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Western Asset Management. In 2009 he resigned from a senior position in the City of London to focus exclusively on his first book, Paper Money Collapse – The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown, which will be published by John Wiley & Sons later in 2011. Detlev lives with his wife and three children in Hampstead, London.
Professor Jesús Huerta de Soto Senior Fellow Jesús Huerta de Soto, professor of economics at the Complutense University of Madrid, is Spain’s leading Austrian economist. As an author, translator, publisher, and teacher, he also ranks among the world’s most active ambassadors for classical liberalism. He is the author of Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles.
Dr. Richard Wellings Senior Fellow Dr. Richard Wellings is the Deputy Editorial Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He is deputy editor of the journal Economic Affairs and works on the production of the IEA’s monograph series. Richard is the editor of the IEA blog and the author of several papers and reports examining economic policy issues from a free-market perspective. You can read some of Richard’s work at the IEA here. The Institute of Economic Affairs’ publications are available here.
Tom Clougherty Senior Fellow As well as being a senior fellow at the Cobden Centre, Tom Clougherty is Executive Director of the free market Adam Smith Institute. In addition to being responsible for the Institute’s overall performance, Tom oversees their policy research and external relations, frequently representing the Institute in the press and media. Before joining the ASI, Tom was Research Director at the Globalisation Institute, where he focused on international development issues, including microfinance and water privatization, and environmental policy. Tom has a degree in law (and a blue in golf) from the University of Cambridge. You can find out more about Tom’s work at the Adam Smith Institute.
Dr. Paul Dragos Aligica Senior Fellow Dr. Aligica earned his PhD in political science from Indiana University, Bloomington. He also earned a PhD in economics from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest and a PhD in sociology from the University of Bucharest. His newest book, Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School (Routledge, London), co-authored with Peter Boettke, examines the work of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics winner, Elinor Ostrom. His previous books include The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe: Economic Ideas in Transition, with Anthony Evans (Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 2009) and Prophecies of Doom, Scenarios of Progress (Continuum Publishers, London, 2007). He has published in journals such as Comparative Strategy, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Revue française d’economie, Public Organization Review, Communist and Post Communist Studies, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Global Business & Economics Review, East European Economics, International Journal of Business and Globalization, East European Politics and Societies, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. In addition to his academic work, he has served as an expert to large international consulting firms and as an advisor or project partner to institutions such as the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, European Union organizations, and the United States Agency for International Development.
John Phelan Fellow John Phelan is a Masters student at the London School of Economics who has worked in the public and private sectors for eight years. He has a weekly column on The Commentator and he blogs at Manchester Liberal.