Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN

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Steine Lecture Series

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 4 p.m. Wilson Hall, room 103, with a reception immediately following

This seminar is available online as a webstream archive.

Windows Media:
http://media-srv1.its.vanderbilt.edu/asxgen/public_affairs/taylor_090310.wmv

Real Player:
http://media-srv1.its.vanderbilt.edu/ramgen/public_affairs/taylor_090310.rm

John B. Taylor

Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

"Getting Off Track: How Government Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis"

In the new book Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, Hoover fellow and Stanford economist John B. Taylor offers empirical research to explain what caused the current financial crisis, what prolonged it, and what worsened it dramatically more than a year after it began.
This short volume does a masterful job of tracking the stunning financial market and macroeconomic events of 2007 and 2008, and it provides an organizing framework that will enable the specialist and novice alike to examine these events in a coherent setting. - James Poterba, Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT and President and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research

Taylor's research has focused on the foundations of modern monetary theory and policy. He is best known for the “Taylor rule,” which is a monetary-policy rule that stipulates how much the central bank should change the nominal interest rate in response to divergences of actual GDP from potential GDP and of actual inflation rates from a target inflation rates. The Taylor rule has been widely used by central banks.

In the past, Taylor served as senior economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisors from 1976-1977 and as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors from 1989 to 1991. He was also a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 2001.

For four years from 2001 to 2005, Taylor served as Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs, where he was responsible for U.S. policies in international finance. 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.

Taylor was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Award for his overall leadership in international finance at the U.S. Treasury. Other awards include 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 has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research. Taylor is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Econometric Society. He formerly served as Vice President of the American Economic Association.

Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1984, Taylor held positions as professor of economics at Princeton University and Columbia University. He 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. Taylor was the founding director of Stanford’s Introductory Economics Center and is a former director of Stanford’s Institute of Economic Policy Research.