John Muellbauer
Oxford economist (Nuffield College; INET Oxford) best known for the Deaton–Muellbauer Almost Ideal Demand System, who since the late 1980s has focused on housing, credit, and consumption — and who wrote the foreword to Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing and has proposed a 'green land.
Overview
John Muellbauer (born 17 July 1944) is a British economist, a Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College and Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) at the Oxford Martin School.[1] He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, and the European Economic Association. Trained at Cambridge and UC Berkeley, he held posts at Birkbeck College London and Warwick before joining Nuffield College in 1981.[1] His most cited work is the 1980 paper with Angus Deaton, "An Almost Ideal Demand System" (American Economic Review), a foundational contribution to applied consumer-demand theory later recognized among the journal's top-twenty papers of its first century.[1]
From the late 1980s Muellbauer became one of the first economists to study systematically how housing markets, household balance sheets, and credit constraints interact with the wider macroeconomy — work that eventually brought him into direct engagement with land and property taxation.[1] He wrote the foreword to Ryan-Collins, Lloyd, and Macfarlane's Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (2017), and the book cites his research (with Blöchliger) on the finding that land/property taxes reduce house-price volatility.[2] In a 2023 INET Oxford working paper, Muellbauer proposed a "green land value tax" for the UK, arguing that over 70% of the value of the average UK home is land value — a higher share, and one that has risen more since the 1980s, than in any other G7 country — and in 2025 he put forward a two-part reform combining a wealth-style surcharge on the top Council Tax bands with a land value tax on farmland, forestry, and unoccupied land above £40,000 per hectare.[3]
See Also
- Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (book page) — the book whose foreword Muellbauer wrote and whose land-tax-and-volatility findings cite his research
- Adair Turner — another mainstream British economist whose work on real-estate credit cycles parallels Muellbauer's housing-and-credit research
- Land Value Tax — the policy Muellbauer's "green land value tax" proposal is a variant of
- Mass Appraisal Methods — the assessment methods a UK land value tax of the kind Muellbauer proposes would require
Sources
- "John Muellbauer," Wikipedia, and INET Oxford faculty profile. Wikipedia · INET Oxford — used for biographical facts (birth date, education, career posts), his position at Nuffield College and INET Oxford, and the Deaton–Muellbauer 1980 Almost Ideal Demand System paper.
- Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd & Laurie Macfarlane, Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (Zed Books, 2017) — used for Muellbauer's authorship of the book's foreword and the book's citation of his research on land taxes and house-price volatility.
- John Muellbauer, "Why We Need a Green Land Value Tax and How to Design It," INET Oxford Working Paper No. 2023-12 (November 2023). Free PDF (INET Oxford) — used for the 70%-of-home-value land-share claim and the green land value tax proposal; the 2025 Council Tax/farmland proposal is corroborated by INET Oxford's news coverage of the proposal. INET Oxford news