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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Professor Gordon L. Clark

Academic Profile

Gordon L Clark DSc (Oxon) FBA is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford University, holds a Professorial Fellowship at St Peter's College and is Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University's Faculty of Business and Economics (Melbourne). Until recently he was also a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School. Previous academic appointments have been at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon's Heinz School and Monash University. Other honours including include being Andrew Mellon Fellow at the US National Academy of Sciences and Visiting Scholar Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst at the University of Marburg.

He has held a number of senior administrative posts including Associate Dean (Finance, Graduate Studies) and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Monash University (Melbourne), Chair of the Faculty Board of Anthropology and Geography (Oxford), and most recently Director and Head of the Oxford University Centre for the Environment including the School of Geography and the Environment. Professor Clark has served on the Social Science Committee of the British Academy, is an elected member of the Oxford University's Socially Responsible Investment Committee (overseeing investment of the university's endowment), is an employer-nominated trustee of the Oxford Staff Pension Scheme, is a consultant to MetallRente (Germany's largest DC pension plan), and is a Founding Governor of the UK Pension Policy Institute.

An economic geographer with an abiding interest in the tension between global financial integration and national and regional institutions, his research has a number of related strands. One is focused on global finance and the investment management industry including the governance structure and decision-making performance of pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. Papers on this topic have been published in the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance (2004, 2006, 2007), the Rotman International Journal of Pension Management (2008, 2010), the Journal of Asset Management (2008), Risk Management and Insurance Review (2009), and Pensions: An International Journal (2010). With Ashby Monk, he is currently completing a monograph on the governance of sovereign wealth funds for Princeton University Press (forthcoming 2012).

His research on household financial decision-making has focused on long-term saving for retirement utilising theories and methods from the behavioural and social sciences in the context of risk and uncertainty. Papers on this topic have been published in the Transactions IBG (2007), Ageing and Society (2008), Environment and Planning A (2009), Pensions: An International Journal (2009), the Journal of Economic Geography (2010) and Urban Studies (2011) supported, in part, by the ESRC, Mercers and Towers Wyatt. With Kendra Strauss and Janelle Knox-Hayes, he is co-author of Saving for Retirement (OUP, 2012). Recent books include the co-edited Managing Financial Risks: From the Global to the Local (OUP 2009) (with Ashby Monk and Adam Dixon), The Geography of Finance (OUP 2007) (with Dariusz Wójcik), Pension Fund Capitalism (OUP 2000), European Pensions & Global Finance (OUP 2003), the co-edited Pension Security in the 21st Century (OUP 2003) and the Oxford Handbook of Pensions and Retirement Income (OUP 2006).

More generally, he has been interested in the responsibilities and behaviour of institutional investors as regards long-term environmental change. This has involved research on institutions' proxy voting behaviour (Environment and Planning A 2008), the strategies of corporate engagement given concerns about environmental liabilities and the sensitivity of firms to brand image and reputation (Environment and Planning A 2005), the UK regulation of corporate disclosure on issues related to environment and social responsibility (University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law 2009), and the governance of investment strategy which has an explicit long-term character (Asian Journal of International Law 2011). As such, his current research focuses upon the design of investment institutions (with Ashby Monk), and the interaction between governance and institutional decision-making in the interests of long-term environmental sustainability and the market for corporate engagement. In part, this project has developed in collaboration with Oxford graduate students as well as his collaboration with UNPRI, Mercers, Towers Watson, and the project led by Tessa Hebb at Carleton University (Ottawa) funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Teaching

MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy

Current graduate students include:
  • Pin-Hsien Chen
    The reform of pension systems in Taiwan
  • Dorothee Franzen
    Impact of regulation on the asset investment of defined benefit pension funds
  • Nicholas Howarth
    The economics and politics of energy and climate change
  • Caitlin McElroy
    Corporate social responsibility in the extractive and energy industries: effects on resource use and indigenous development
  • Alex Money
    Corporate water risk: a concept in search of consensus
  • Dane Rook
    Behavioural strategy and geographic reckoning in environmental investments: managing heuristic bias in sustainability decision dynamics
  • Rajiv Sharma
    The role of private institutional investors in developing urban infrastructure assets
  • Yin Yang
    A comparative study of low-carbon paradigm for local-scale economy between London and Beijing
D.Phil. students successfully completing since 2001:
  • Csaba Burger (2011)
    Occupational pensions in Germany - an economic geography
  • Taylor Gray (2011)
    A corporate geography of Canada: governance and networks
  • Claire Woods (2011)
    Legal frameworks for sustainable investment
  • Eric Knight (2010)
    The finance of climate change: transitioning to a low carbon economy
  • Leng Lee (2010)
    Rural-urban migration in China
  • Ville-Pekka Sorsa (2010)
    Pension fund capitalism in Europe: institutional organisation and governance of investment in Finnish pension insurance companies
  • Adam Dixon (2009)
    The geography of European financial integration and long-term asset management
  • Janelle Knox-Hayes (2009)
    Constructing an international market for carbon trading: an institutional perspective.
  • Lisa Hagerman (2008)
    Public pension fund investment in urban revitalization.
  • Ashby Monk (2008)
    The burden of corporate pension liabilities in the emerging global economy.
  • Kendra Strauss (2008)
    Choice, risk and the context of decision making in UK pensions.
  • Emiko Caerlewy-Smith (2007)
    Investment decision-making: attitudes and actions of UK defined benefit pension fund trustees.
  • James Salo (2006)
    Corporate environmental performance: governance, intangible assets, and financial markets.
  • Morag Torrance (2006)
    The financialisation of the urban infrastructure landscape: unravelling financial flows into urban geographies.
  • Terry Babcock-Lumish (2004)
    Communities of trust: decision making and innovation
  • Tessa Hebb (2004)
    Pension fund corporate engagement: causes and consequences.
  • Dariusz Wójcik (2002)
    Corporate governance and capital market integration in Europe: an economic geography perspective.

Selected Publications

Books (since 2001)
Papers and Articles (since 2005)

Recent papers with colleagues can be found at the Working Papers in Employment, Work and Finance website.