Alan M. Taylor
Alan M. Taylor is an economist, academic, and policymaker. He is a professor at Columbia University. He is also a Research Associate
at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
On 16 August 2024 Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves appointed Taylor to be an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England with effect from September 2024.
Early life and career
Born and raised in Yorkshire, Taylor attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield, and went up to King's College, Cambridge, on an Open Scholarship. In the Mathematical Tripos he graduated asa Wrangler in 1987 and enrolled at Harvard University on being awarded the Joseph Hodges Choate Memorial Fellowship. At Harvard he earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1992, specializing in economic history and international economics; he studied with and was influenced by Jeffrey Williamson and Maurice Obstfeld. After completing a pre/post-doctoral fellowship in the Harvard Academy Scholars Program, he has held appointments in the economics departments at Northwestern University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Virginia. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2004. He was appointed at the Bank of England as a Houblon-Norman/George Fellow in 2009–10. He has also held several visiting appointments, including at Stanford University, the London School of Economics, and London Business School. He took leave from academia to be a senior advisor at Morgan Stanley in 2010–11 based in New York and London where he worked on global macro and emerging markets. He took up a role as a senior advisor at PIMCO in 2019 based in Newport Beach.
Research and publications
Taylor has written or edited 10 books, and more than 80 journal articles, on problems in international economics, trade, finance, growth and macroeconomics, often in combination with his other major field of economic history. He has been a lecturer/visitor with central banks and international organizations, served on many editorial boards, held multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, and has been funded by other grant making bodies, including the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is the author, with Robert Feenstra, of the widely used textbook International Economics.Economic history of Argentina
In the 1990s Taylor made contributions to Argentine economic history, starting with his thesis research which was awarded the Gerschenkron Prize by the Economic History Association. His work focused on long-term real and financial factors in slow development after 1914, and he challenged the conventional view that relative divergence began only after 1945 in the Perón era and later.He went on to collaborate extensively with Gerardo della Paolera, with whom he wrote several papers, published one book, and one edited volume. Their work was recognized with the Cole Prize by the Economic History Association.
The trilemma
In the mid-1990s Taylor began a fruitful collaboration with Obstfeld tackling the evolution of global financial integration and macroeconomics in the very long run. Their work was recognized with the Sanwa Prize and published in several articles and a book.In 1997, Obstfeld and Taylor were the first to introduce the now-standard term "trilemma" into economics, which is used to describe the macroeconomic policy tradeoff between fixed exchange rates, open capital markets, and monetary policy autonomy. In work with Jay Shambaugh, they developed the first methods to empirically validate this central, yet hitherto untested, hypothesis in international macroeconomics.