In memory of James P Smith (1943 - 2022)

By James Banks and Richard Blundell

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our friend and colleague James P Smith, who died last Thursday, 4th August, a day after his 79th birthday. Jim was an internationally outstanding labour economist who made seminal contributions in the areas of health, ageing, female labour supply, immigration and racial earnings differentials. Following collaborative work on wealth inequality in the UK and US with James Banks and Richard Blundell in 1999, Jim became an International Research Fellow of the IFS and had visited the Institute twice a year since then, also serving as a member of the CPP advisory board since 2015.

Over the last twenty-two years Jim co-authored over twenty published papers with nine different IFS coauthors, including a 2011 paper with Rob Joyce and Alissa Goodman, ‘The Long shadow cast by childhood physical and mental problems on adult life’, that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and subsequently awarded the Cozzarelli Prize for outstanding scientific excellence and originality. He was involved in impactful and highly cited CPP research on the links between health, functioning and economic resources at older ages (with James Banks, Zoë Oldfield, Ali Muriel, Soumaya Keynes and Elaine Kelly), and on consumption, housing and wealth dynamics (with James Banks, Richard Blundell, Zoë Oldfield and Peter Levell). A theme of these papers was the use of international comparisons involving detailed analysis of micro-data, combined with Jim’s deep economic intuition, to shed light on the processes driving important economic social and health outcomes in situations where other types of methods (and in particular fully structural models or fully reduced form analysis of policy changes) were not feasible. And many of these papers also used datasets that Jim himself had helped develop and support- he was a major influence in the development and funding of longitudinal ageing studies around the world, including the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, in which CPP researchers play a key role.

During the course of his many visits to IFS Jim not only worked on his many collaborative papers but also took a keen interest in the projects and activities of all researchers. He particularly enjoyed speaking to younger researchers and was very generous in his time when hearing about, and commenting on, their research. Over the years he also developed friendly connections with the Institute’s support staff, and his arrival was always welcomed by all. Jim was a mentor and friend to many of us and his contribution to the intellectual life of the CPP will be hugely missed.