Austen Saunders

Background

About Austen Saunders

I've always loved learning new things and working with talented people. Since 2015 I've found that at the Bank of England where I work on financial stability projects and, before that, on financial regulation and banking supervision. Before I joined the Bank I got it at Cambridge doing a PhD on seventeenth century literature, followed by postdoc research at Oxford. When I moved to the Bank I was curious about economics and public policy, and wanted to push myself using quantitative skills I hadn't needed since maths and physics at school. I'm still curious! Having studied economics to MSc level, I remain beguiled by the challenge of matching theory with data with good policy making to understand things better and solve problems. I also discovered that I find coding incredibly enjoyable (I work in R). Most of all, I value the motivation that comes from knowing what the Bank's mission is, why that's important, and how what I do helps us deliver our goals. Literature and history are still passions of mine. I publish research and I'm a member of the editorial team of The Oxford Traherne (a new edition of the works of the poet Thomas Traherne). The humanities seem to have hard-wired my mind at some deep level, because however much quantitative work I do, I never feel I've got a complete view of something until I know its history and why it's the way it is. At the Bank, I ran an economic history group for several years, and I enjoy talking things over with colleagues who share my obscure interests in the history and philosophy of economics as a discipline. But things work both ways - I also do a lot of quantitative work on literary history which I never imagined doing before (I work with data on what was being printed).