John B. Taylor

John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution. He is Director of the Stanford Introductory Economics Center. He formerly served as director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where he is now a senior fellow. Taylor’s fields of expertise are macroeconomics, monetary economics, and international economics. He is known for his research on the foundations of modern monetary theory and policy, which has been applied by central banks and financial market analysts around the world.

He has an active interest in public policy. He served as President of the Mont Pelerin Society and as a member of the Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance created by the G20. He served as senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1976 to 1977, and as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1991. He was also a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 2001. Taylor served as a member of the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors from 1996-98 and 2005-10.

For four years from 2001 to 2005, Taylor served as Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs where he was responsible for currency markets, trade in financial services, foreign investment, international debt and development, and oversight of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He was also responsible for coordinating financial policy with the G-7 countries, was chair of the OECD working party on international macroeconomics, and was a Member of the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. His book "Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World" chronicles his years as head of the international division at Treasury. His book "Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis" was one of the first on the 2008 financial crisis, and he has since followed up writing or coediting over a dozen additional books on restoring economic growth and preventing future crises, including "First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring Americas’ Prosperity" for which he won the 2012 Hayek Prize. His most recent book is "Choose Economic Freedom: Enduring Policy Lessons from the 1970s and 1980s" with George P. Shultz.

Taylor received the 2016 Adam Smith Award from the Association of Private Enterprise Education and the 2015 Truman Medal for Economic Policy for extraordinary contribution to the formation and conduct of economic policy. In 2010, he received the Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation and the Adam Smith Award from the National Association for Business Economics for his work as a researcher, public servant, and teacher. Taylor was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Award for his overall leadership at the U.S. Treasury, the Treasury Distinguished Service Award for designing and implementing the currency reforms in Iraq, and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay for his work in resolving the 2002 financial crisis. He was awarded the George P. Shultz Distinguished Public Service Award at Stanford. He received the University-wide Hoagland Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching and the Rhodes Prize for his high teaching ratings in Stanford’s introductory economics course, and recently the 2015 Stanford Economics Department Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society; he formerly served as vice president of the American Economic Association.

Previously, Taylor held positions of professor of economics at Princeton University and Columbia University. Taylor received a B.A. in economics summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1973.