Current research: Monetary policy and central bank independence, primarily in the UK and continental Europe, European monetary integration, financial systems, and macroeconomic and monetary policy in Middle Eastern economies.

David Cobham is Professor of Economics. His main research area has been UK monetary policy, but he also has substantial research interests in European monetary integration, central bank independence, financial systems and Middle Eastern economies.Most recently he has worked on the issue of monetary policy and asset prices, on the Bank of England's reaction function,  on quantitative easing and on the classification of monetary policy frameworks

He is an active member of the committee of the Money, Macro and Finance Research Group, and Associate Editor of the Review of Middle East Economics and Finance. He has been Houblon-Norman Research Fellow at the Bank of England in 1987, and again in 2001. He was a member of the organising committee of a Norges Bank conference on Inflation Targeting Twenty Years On (June 2009), and member of the organising committee of a conference on 'The Euro Area and the Financial Crisis' , hosted by the National Bank of Slovakia (September 2010). 

He organised a conference on 'Monetary policy before, during and after the crisis', sponsored by SIRE and the MMF, at Heriot-Watt University in September 2011. Papers from the conference were published in a special issue of Oxford Economic Papers (April 2013).

He co-edited, with Chris Adam and Ken Mayhew, an issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy (spring 2013) on 'The economic record of the Labour government, 1997-2010'.

He organised a conference on 'Monetary analysis and monetary policy frameworks' in Edinburgh in April 2014, papers from which were published in a special issue of The Manchester School.

He organised, together with George Bratsiotis of the University of Manchester, a seminar at Heriot-Watt in December 2015 on 'German macro: how it's different and why that matters', papers from which are now available on the European Policy Centre website.

He was the lead organiser of the Money, Macro & Finance Research Group 50th annual conference, held at the Royal Bank of Scotland Conference Centre, 5-7 September 2018, and guest editor of the related special issue of the Manchester School journal.

He is one of the founders and organisers of the Research Initiative on the Economics of the Middle East, and organised RIEME's 4th workshop in Panmure House, Edinburgh, 14-15 November 2019.

He was local organiser for the MMF PhD Conference in April 2022.

His current major research project is the classification of countries' monetary policy frameworks, the basic results of which can be found at www.monetaryframeworks.org. The classification currently covers some 180 countries from 1974 to 2017, and work is underway to update the period to 2023.