< The 2015 All-Europe Research Team

Total appearances: 51

Team debut: 1986

Unranked last year, UBS returns to this roster in second place, the position it earned in 2012 and 2013. Newcomer Lawrence Hatheway directs a group of five economists stationed in Frankfurt and London. “They have a very constructive method of analysis,” observes one portfolio manager. The UBS team forecasts that the region’s real gross domestic product will expand by slightly more than 1 percent this year and underscores the “low probability of a triple-dip recession scenario because none of the preconditions for a recession seem to be in place,” says Hatheway, 56, pointing to the absence of excessive inventory buildup and lack of significant fiscal tightening or increase in the cost of capital. The chief cyclical concern is inflation, which the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing program is meant to address. But even with this policy shift, “Europe is going to be a recurring source of volatility in the capital markets, and we’ll probably see more jitters,” he asserts. “That’s partly because growth and inflation are uncomfortably close to zero, and small changes in market perceptions of risk and so forth could introduce more volatile trading conditions.” Finally, he notes, the euro zone crisis, which began as a liquidity and solvency crisis, is “becoming transformed into a potential political one,” as the outcomes of various elections across the continent and in the U.K. “could prove to be destabilizing to the capital markets.” Hatheway, who has been with UBS for 23 years, moved to London in 2002 and was named chief economist in 2005. He graduated from Washington’s Whitman College with a bachelor’s degree in history and German and earned a master’s degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin.