It was at this time that the mythical sailor Alice in whose existence none of his friends

It was at this time that the mythical sailor Alice, in whose existence none of his friends believed, made a dramatic and permanent reappearance in his life.He was a natural research collaborator. He worked immensely long hours, starting when most people were asleep, writing papers in the early morning, then reading voraciously for the rest of the day. Even so, he had more ideas than he could formulate alone, and he loved to develop points in argument. Mainly worked.Geroski wrote dozens of academic papers in his years at Southampton, and established his reputation as an applied industrial economist. He was part of the group involved in founding a European Association for Research in Industrial Economics, and later became editor of its journal.

He was also an awesome teacher, able to make the most complex issues simple and the most arcane arguments interesting. There was also a vibrant group of young and irreverent academics trying to make a mark, collectively known as “kiddies corner” We competed and collaborated and worked. These included understanding the relationship between the structure of an industry (in terms of the size distribution of firms) and its profitability and explaining why profits persist in particular industries for so long despite the processes of entry and exit.Geroski was never a theorist, and was only concerned with theory in so far as it guided his empirical work. His method was resolutely econometric, and he discovered an unrivalled ability to sense intuitively the relationships in the data, and experiment across the range of econometric methods, both known and being developed, to find the ones that could bring those relationships into the light.His first job was at Southampton University in 1977, as Lecturer in Industrial Economics. The Southampton Economics Department was quite large, with particular strengths in econometrics and modelling. For reasons that never became entirely clear, Geroski liked England so much he applied for graduate studies at Warwick University, and never returned to live in the United States.

He was so gauchely American at that time, but had a fear of flying he did not conquer for many years – I used to argue that he was only in England because he was too scared to fly back.It was at Warwick that Geroski identified his intellectual mission. He was one, perhaps the most eminent, of a group of economics graduate students working with Keith Cowling to apply the new statistical methods then being devised by econometricians in Britain and America to the traditional questions in industrial economics. Despite spending a life in or around academia, and achieving real academic distinction, this was no ivory-tower professor.He commenced his higher education at one of New York State’s leading liberal arts colleges, Bard College, where he read, thought, argued and lived prodigiously in the prescribed manner for students at such institutions in the early 1970s. He received grounding across the board – sciences, humanities, social sciences, drama and music – which provided the basis for a breadth of intellectual interest for the rest of his life, after his academic concerns had narrowed to economics. It was from this time that Geroski became a creature surprisingly rare in the contemporary academic world: a scholar.He spent his junior year abroad in Manchester, where he met his lifelong partner Alice Sampson, who promptly disappeared for five years to sail around the world. These ranged from a love for burgers and American football to an openness and friendliness to all, stemming from a deeply rooted sense of egalitarianism. In 1985 there was a Pannett family exhibition at the Arun Art Centre, in Arundel, nine members from three generations contributing.In her eighties, Juliet Pannett’s eyesight deteriorated.