Core faculty

Harald Liedtke – Course Director

Harald joined Bayer in 1986 as a commercial trainee. During his 25 years with the company he worked in different functions with growing responsibilities in Germany, Mexico, USA, Brazil, Taiwan and is currently heading the Bayer organization in the Middle East as their Managing Director.

Prior to this assignment Harald was responsible for Corporate Communications at Bayer Material Science. Harald joined the OUPEB course in 2009. He is married and has two children.

John Thanassoulis – Senior Tutor

John is a University Lecturer in the Department of Economics, Oxford University, and Official Student (Fellow) of Economics at Christ Church. He was educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, studying mathematics followed by economics. After completion of his academic studies, John worked first in the telecommunications industry before spending two years as a competition policy (antitrust) consultant. His antitrust and strategy work has covered sectors including finance, advertising, fmcg and transport. John subsequently returned to academia to conduct economic research on Business Strategy and Finance. He has worked on supermarket supply chains, bankers’ pay and financial regulation, and pricing strategy and its implications for consumers in media and telecommunications industries. John is an occasional guest on BBC Oxford where he explains current economic issues.

Rui Esteves – Syndicate Tutor

Rui Esteves is a University Lecturer in Economics at Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. He was educated in the Universities of Porto and California, Berkeley. Before coming to Oxford, Rui held an academic appointment at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on topics of international finance, institutional economics, and public finance in a historical perspective. Recent projects deal with the nature of governance in the sovereign debt market, the determinants of capital flows to developing nations, fixed exchange rate pegs, and emigrants’ remittances.

Simon Cowan – Syndicate Tutor

Simon is a University Lecturer in the Department of Economics, University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor in Economics at Worcester College. He was educated at the University of Oxford. After working in management consultancy, where he worked for the UK Government on a major privatization, he took up his current position.His research focuses on the economics of pricing. Current projects include the assessment of the effects of price discrimination by large firms on consumers and on society as a whole. He also works on the regulation of prices in network industries.

Kevin Sheppard – Syndicate Tutor

Kevin studied economics and mathematics at the Universities of Texas before obtaining his PhD in Economics at the University of California-San Diego. He specializes in measuring and modeling risk. His current research analyzes how risk evolves over time focusing substantially on asymmetric transfer across time. Other current projects include exploring how shocks in one market spread across the globe and how uncertainty about the future affects the amount of reward required to bear a risk. Kevin also researches theoretical issues in econometrics with a specialization in the tools needed to analyze financial market data.

Page last edited: 17 November 2011