Institut d'études avancées de Paris
France
fellow
Will Bateman
2026-2027
Home institution
Australian National University
Country of origin (home institution)
Australia
Discipline(s)
Economy and finance
Theme(s)
Labor, Capital & Innovation
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Will Bateman is a professor at the Australian National University, College of Law, Governance and Policy. He studies the political, legal and constitutional regulation of public and private finance, with a special focus on central banking, sovereign debt markets, digital currencies, sustainable investing and crisis finance. His current projects study: fiscal functions of monetary policy under large debt loads; war finance; foreign-currency operations of central banks before, during and after trade liberalisation; non-economic functions of monetary policy; and the constitutional legitimacy of economic policy.
Will Bateman is also interested in the regulation of artificial intelligence in collaboration with computer science experts and public/private sector organisations. His current focus is on sovereign artificial intelligence (AI), and the impact of generative AI on liberal democracy and the rule of law. He maintains a long-standing interest in the political economy of constitutions.
In September 2026, he joined the Paris IAS for a ten-month residency as part of the FIAS (French Institutes for Advanced Study) international mobility program – funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (GA-101217263).
Research Project
Monetary authority and (de-)liberalisation: constitutional dimensions of foreign currency activities in advanced economies
The project seeks to understand how central banks’ activities in foreign currencies are structured and change as liberal economic and political systems evolve. It approaches that topic by studying the foreign currency activities of two reserve-currency issuing central banks (The Eurosystem/Banque de France The United States Federal Reserve System), one highly-traded-currency issuing central bank (The Swiss National Bank) and one central-bank controlled private bank (Continuous-Linked Settlement Bank) between 1995 and 2025. The temporal boundary is designed to capture the continuity and change of market and institutional practices between ‘Great Moderation’ conditions of the 1990s, the shocks of the financial crisis from 2007, and the gradual de-liberalisation of trade, finance and constitutional politics from 2020. All official sector foreign currency activities (market intervention, reserve management, swaps and gold transactions) are in scope.
The project will generate new knowledge on long-standing puzzles regarding the institutional design and systemic operation of the office sector’s position in the foreign exchange market.
Recognising the epochal shifts of our time, the project will contribute to debates across social science disciplines on the de-liberalisation of geopolitics, economic policy and constitutionalism. It forms part of a broader intellectual aim to propose a reworking of democratic constitutional theory to include public economic institutions.
Research Interests:
Law; Economy; History of central banking, Debt; International finance.