Nick Kotucha
Nick recently completed an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Politics and International Relations and will now take up a Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Sheffield.
Research
My current research focuses on the political economy of finance, and the role that social processes and ideas play in shaping the governance of the financial system. I am particularly interested in the ways in which central banking policy is shaped by wider economic, political, and social shifts beyond the realm of formal economics, as well as issues of democratic accountability raised by current governance arrangements.
My previous research has investigated the role of domestic institutional and structural factors in influencing macroprudential policies in Europe. Drawing on Germany and the UK as my main case studies, I traced the differences that are emerging within this policy field, paying particular attention to how the agency of central bankers is embedded in wider institutional and structural contexts, and the extent to which other political actors are able to insert themselves into this highly technical realm.
Other projects
In addition to these broader themes, I am currently also working on the following projects and papers:
- With Andrew Baker and Andreas Miyashiro: Exploring continuities in central banking discourse on climate change. Central bank policy on climate change has shifted rapidly. Our research explores how these changes are still shaped by relatively stable professional identities and self-understandings.
- With Andrew Baker: ‘The Bank of England and Social Injustice: The Politics and Ethics of Loan to Income Ratios’. In this paper we are developing a normative theory of macroprudential policy in the housing sector. Our key argument is that even though macroprudential policies are usually cast as being based on a purely technical exercise of optimal calibration, they in fact often involve deeply normative decisions on the burden that is placed on different groups in society.
- With Ben Clift: ‘The politics of implementation’. In this paper we are examining how technocrats involved in the implementation process of economic policies are able to creatively remodel the ideas that they are tasked with implementing.
- With Andreas Miyashiro: Exploring the challenges to policy separation in an age of high government debt levels and interest rates. In this project we are particularly interested in recent leakages between fiscal policy, monetary policy, and financial regulation and what this might mean for the sustainability of current governance arrangements.
- ‘Depoliticising financial regulation: The case of central banks’. In this project, I aim to map the different strategies of depoliticisation that central banks have developed to deal with their expanded regulatory portfolios after the Global Financial Crisis. As I show, these strategies are often very different from those to be found in the monetary realm that preoccupy most of the literature on central banks, and they create their own set of distinct challenges for those seeking to extend the sphere of deliberative democracy.
Upcoming: The politics of macroprudential policy diffusion in the Global South
Finally, my Leverhulme project, which starts in February 2026, will look at the politics of macroprudential policy diffusion in the Global South. The shift from a “microprudential” to a “macroprudential” approach to financial regulation has often been heralded as one of the biggest paradigm shifts in economic policy in the last two decades. However, we still know very little about how this new approach has evolved in the Global South, and how it interacts with locally specific economic and institutional arrangements. This project seeks to trace the development of macroprudential policy in Brazil, Ghana, and Malaysia, to distil some more general lessons about the nature of global policy diffusion in relation to financial regulation. Its ultimate goal is to reflect on the adequacy of global governance structures in this area, with a particular focus on inequality, epistemic justice, and the scope for autonomy in carving out distinct national trajectories of economic development.
Publications
Journal articles:
'Back to the future: Labour and the politics of financial deregulation', Political Quarterly, 2025. (Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-923x.70026)
'The national life of transnational models: Macroprudential policy and the politics of translation', Review of International Political Economy, 2024. (Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2024.2427880)
Other publications:
‘Will There be Another Financial Crisis? If Labour Continues Cutting Red Tape, Maybe’, The Political Quarterly Digested Reads, 17 December 2025. https://politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/will-there-be-another-financial-crisis-if-labour-continues-cutting-red-tape-maybe/
‘Labour's deregulation gamble’, SPERI, 8 December 2025. https://speri-blog.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog/2025/labours-deregulation-gamble
‘The UK government’s risky rollback of financial regulation threatens long-term growth’, The Conversation, 17 November 2025. https://theconversation.com/the-uk-governments-risky-rollback-of-financial-regulation-threatens-long-term-growth-266418
‘Understanding macroprudential divergence: growth models, housing systems and the issue of financial stability’, SPERI, 2022. Available at: https://speri-blog.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog/2022/understanding-macroprudential-divergence