Behind the Scenes Contributors
Externalities of a different sort are behind the inclusion of my last two occasional accountants. Although both produced distinguished publications, neither of them would be recognised as primarily in accounting. Yet both were responsible for positive externalities which did much to raise the Faculty’s game in accounting. Both were/are Faculty ‘lifers’, whose service has spanned seven decades and counting.
Brian Reddaway had a deep understanding of accounting. He practised ‘financial statement analysis’ before the term was invented, advising his College— Clare—on its investments in companies, as well as the wider world, through his ‘Academic Investor’ column for the Investors Chronicle. He directed the Singh/ Whittington project on company accounts, and his role as constructive critic is very warmly acknowledged in the publications emerging from that project, as in so much work published by the DAE while he was Director. Offer (2008) describes him as ‘the greatest Cambridge influence on Charles [Feinstein]’. I was a very grateful beneficiary of his grasp of accounting and his skill in inference in my work on takeover and bankruptcy. The inductive approach he deployed in scrutinising and improving our work was for long embedded in Tripos training in applied economics—often based on national accounts data.
William Peterson actually taught national income accounting in the Tripos from the 1980s until after the millennium, so that generations of Tripos students had a formal framework for the accounts-based exercises which formed a distinctive part of their training in applied economics—one much appreciated by many employers. He was a linchpin of the Faculty’s teaching effort, contributing disproportionately to the management of an effective Tripos when many colleagues were busy feuding or promoting their own careers. On the research side, his contribution to the CGP founded by Stone has been mentioned earlier. There his extraordinary grip on the range of accounting and programming and econometrics and economic theory meant that he naturally fell, alongside Barker, into the central role of building the i nfrastructure of the massive model. Then the rest of us[1] benefited greatly from his ‘upstream’ work, using the model in our various specialist publications.
- [1] Who in my limited time on the Project included a future President of the American EconomicAssociation, a Governor of the Bank of England, a Director of the National Institute of Economic andSocial Research, a Chief Economist for Scotland, and holders of many prestigious professorships.
