Professor Stephen Smith Link to research pages here Stephen Smith is a Professor of Economics at University College London, and Executive Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. His main research and teaching interests lie in the fields of public finance and environmental economics.

He is a graduate of the Universities of Oxford (BA), Manchester (MA(Econ)), and London (PhD). From 1977 he worked for eight years as an economist in the Department of Trade and Industry as a member of the Government Economic Service.

In 1985 he joined the staff of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research institute specialising in the economic analysis of taxation and public finance. There he established a research group covering issues of European fiscal policy, environmental taxation, and local government finance, and in 1990 was appointed Deputy Director of IFS. He joined the Department of Economics at UCL part-time in 1990, and left IFS to a full-time post at UCL in 1997. He was Head of the UCL Economics Department from 1997 to 2002. Since September 2008 he has been Executive Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences.

At UCL Stephen Smith teaches a graduate course on European Environmental Policy for UCL's MSc in Environmental and Resource Economics. He also supervises graduate research on public economics and environmental economics.

Stephen Smith is a Research Associate of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and a CESifo Research Fellow. He is a member of the DEFRA Academic Panel on Environmental Economics and of the High-Level Economics Group of the European Environment Agency, and has acted as a consultant to a number of government departments and international organisations including HM Treasury, DEFRA, the UK Environment Agency, the OECD, the European Commission, and the IMF. He has also been an adviser on tax reform to the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic.

Stephen Smith's current research covers the economics of instrument choice in environmental regulation (evaluation of practical applications of emissions trading; theory of regulation combining tax and direct regulation; instrument choice and waste management), and the economics of European indirect tax policy (VAT treatment of international trade in goods and services; excise tax policy).