Dame Rachel Susan Griffith (born 16 May 1963) is a British and American academic and educator. She is professor of economics at the University of Manchester and a research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Griffith was president of the European Economic Association for 2015, making her the first woman to hold the position. She was also joint managing editor of The Economic Journal between 2011 and 2017.
Griffith holds both UK and US citizenship.
Griffith earned her BA degree magna cum laude in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 1985, her MSc degree in econometrics and forecasting from the City of London Polytechnic in 1991, and her PhD from Keele University in 1999.
Griffith is currently Research Director of the IFS and co-director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP). She was elected President of the Royal Economic Society from 2019 to 2020.
She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association and a Research Fellow of CEPR. She won the Birgit Grodal Award (2014), was awarded a CBE in for services to economic policy in 2015 and was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to economic policy and education.
She served as Deputy Chair of the Economics sub-Panel of the Research Excellence Framework. Currently, she has her second ERC Advanced Grant to study behavior of consumers and firms to see how government policy will impact food markets.
Griffith's presidential address to the European Economic Association at the University of Mannheim, Germany entitled "Gluttony and Sloth? Labour Market Nonseparabilities and the Rise in Obesity", reflected her recent research into the relationship between changes in relative food prices and the nutritional quality of householdsâ shopping baskets.
In her Royal Economic Society Public Lecture 2015, "Does Starbucks Pay Enough Tax", Griffith argued that corporate tax should be charged like VAT. Griffith stated that the current system of corporate taxation is outdated and taxing corporate profits in the location where value is created is not very meaningful. She suggested taxing profits at the destination of sales rather than at the source of profits would be an improvement. Griffith cited two papers, one by Auerbach and Devereux (2012), the other by Devereux and Vella (2014), in support of her case. Griffith's previous research in this area considers how influential corporate income taxes are in determining where firms choose to legally own intellectual property, i.e. the way in which intellectual property accounts for firms' assets and if they can be used by firms to shift income offshore to reduce their corporate income tax liability.