Helene Rey, an influential business mind and woman.

April 3, 2013 - PRLog -- “I was kind of struck by this idea that there were these analogies,” she said in an interview at her London Business School office, where work tables overflowing with papers share space with a two-seat sofa. “If you want to dialogue with someone, or you want to make a transaction with someone, then it’s going to be very useful if you choose a medium of exchange that a lot of people use.”

Rey was born and raised in Brioude, “in the middle of nowhere” in south-central France, where her father was a civil engineer and her mother a teacher. She was a good student, and in the French school system that meant she was encouraged to focus on mathematics. She found she liked the rigor of the subject. While that grew into an enthusiasm for physics, the social element of economics proved more intriguing. As a relatively young field, she said economics is easier for newcomers to show signs of innovation and entrepreneurship towards the subject  and make a contribution.

“It’s a nice mix of theoretical thinking and interesting data,” she said. “You can actually look at big issues that impact the daily lives of people.”

In 2012 she won the inaugural Birgit Grodal Award (http://www.eeassoc.org/index.php?page=211), given by the EEA to a European-based female economist who’s made a “significant contribution” to the profession. Pissarides, when was the association’s president, announced the creation of the award in 2011.

He said he remembers being impressed by Rey’s ability to work as a “mature economist” at the LSE. She asked big questions that other students, more risk-averse and worried about getting a degree, would shy away from.

“She would go and get the data, and try to understand it by sitting at a computer for hours on end,” he said. Now, “she’s the leader in the field on the sustainability of current-account imbalances, something that’s going on all the time, especially when we have so many imbalances in the global economy. She is the academic version of innovation and entrepreneurship”

Current-account data measure trade balances, income from foreign investments and government cash transfers. The U.S. deficit will equal 3.1 percent of gross domestic product this year, down from 6 percent in 2006, according to an IMF forecast.

While the biggest item on the policy agenda is a banking union, the outlook for its implementation, along with revamping bank oversight, is waning as the crisis drags on, she said.

“As time goes by, all the announcements we made are becoming weaker,” Rey said. “There’s a loss in momentum in the will to do things.”

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