Donald Hay

Biography

DONALD HAY was an active member of the University of Oxford Department of Economics 1970-2000. His research interests included applied industrial economics, and the interface between Christian ethics and economics. His published work included one of the first papers on strategic entry deterrence in spatial markets, a paper on the impact on manufacturing firms of the Brazilian trade liberalization, a  monograph (with Derek Morris, Shujie Yao, and Guy Liu) on the effects of market liberalization on Chinese manufacturing firms, and a book on Christianity and economics. He also maintained an interest in the reform of competition policy in the UK. He taught microeconomics, industrial organization (at both graduate and undergraduate level), and supervised several doctoral theses in industrial economics. He published, with Derek Morris, an advanced textbook, Industrial Economics and Organisation: Theory and Evidence (second edition, 1991). In 2000 he became the first Head of the Division of Social Sciences in the University, a position he held for five years. He acted as Pro Vice Chancellor for Planning and Resources 2006-7, and was responsible for the implementation of the University Resource Allocation System (the JRAM) in 2009. Since 2009 he has been fully retired. His main interest in retirement has been the development of a program, Developing a Christian Mind, to enable Christian graduate students, researchers and academics (across all disciplines) to begin to integrate their faith and their academic activities.

Academic biography

Research topics

[Please note: I retired ten years ago, and because of the responsibilities of my last two positions in the University of Oxford, I was not fully research active from about 2000 onwards.]

1. Exploring and interpreting Biblical material that relates (broadly) to economic activities and flourishing, seeking to identify themes that transcend the original contexts and can be (cautiously) applied to contemporary economic issues.
    
2. Researching academic and (serious) popular literatures related to my involvement with the Social Sciences and Law stream of the Developing a Christian Mind programme in Oxford. Three core topics form the foundation for the stream: Social scientific and Christian understandings of human beings in society; Social ethics in the social sciences – theological and secular approaches; and Political authorities – the contribution of Christian political theory. I seek to keep abreast of key literatures relating to the first two topics, to ensure that the material presented in DCM is relevant to graduate students currently studying and researching in the social sciences and law.
    
3. Ongoing work with Professor Gordon Menzies of UTS Sydney, Australia, exploring economic behaviour from the standpoint of Biblical anthropology. The work is partly a critique of existing assumptions in neoclassical economics of ‘rational economic man’, and partly an attempt to model behaviour analytically with foundations drawn from Christian anthropology.

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