John B. Taylor

Who is John B. Taylor?

John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Born in Yonkers, New York, he graduated from Shady Side Academy and earned his A.B. from Princeton University in 1968 and Ph.D. from Stanford in 1973, both in economics. He taught at Columbia University from 1973–1980 and the Woodrow Wilson School and Economics Department of Princeton University from 1980–1984 before returning to Stanford. He has received several teaching prizes and teaches Stanford's introductory economics course as well as Ph.D. courses in monetary economics.

In research published in 1979 and 1980 he developed a model of price and wage setting—called the staggered contract model—which served as an underpinning of a new class of empirical models with rational expectations and sticky prices—sometimes called new Keynesian models. In a 1993 paper he proposed the Taylor rule, intended as a recommendation about how nominal interest rates should be determined, which then became a rough summary of how central banks actually do set them. He has been active in public policy, serving as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs during the first term of the George W. Bush Administration. His book Global Financial Warriors chronicles this period. He was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the George H. W. Bush Administration and Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisors during the Ford and Carter Administrations.