Education
Brown University; Street Anne"s College.
Brown University; Street Anne"s College.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy, University of California, Los Los Angeles She chairs the Executive Committee of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Cairncross was on the staff of The Guardian from 1973-1984, and before that spent periods on the financial staff of The Times, The Banker and The Observer. She was on the staff of The Economist for 20 years, most recently as management editors
She chaired the Economic and Social Research Council between 2001 and 2007 and was President of the British Science Association (2005-2006).
Her book, The Company of the Future (), was published in 2002 by Harvard Business School Press. Cairncross is also the author of The Death of Distance (), a study of the economic and social effects of the global communications revolution, first published in 1997 and re-published in a new edition in 2001.
Cairncross became Rector of Exeter College, Oxford in October 2004, a role she relinquished in October 2014. Cairncross is a non-executive director of Stramongate Limited, and a presenter of British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4"s Analysis programme.
In 2004-2005, Cairncross held the honorary post of High Sheriff of Greater London.
Cairncross read Modern History at Street Anne"s College, Oxford, graduating in 1965, and holds an Master of Arts in Economics from Brown University, Rhode Island. She holds honorary degrees from Trinity College Dublin, City University, and the Universities of Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Loughborough and Kingston. In January 1988, Frances Cairncross and Mary Ellen Synon wrote an article from the Economist that depicted the Republic of Ireland as bureaucratic and impoverished.
This article caused anger among both the Fianna Fáil government of the time.
The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs also criticized the piece, stating that the Economist article "did serious damage to the image of Ireland overseas".