President |
Frances Woolley |
Secretary-Treasurer |
Werner Antweiler |
President Elect & Conference Organizer |
Angela Redish |
Vice President |
Scott Taylor |
Past President |
Nancy Gallini |
Executive Director |
Vivian Tran |
Assistant Treasurer |
Ana Ferrer |
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The theme of David Laidler's research is summed up by
the title of his 1988 Presidential address to the CEA, Taking Money
Seriously (CJE 1988) and in the titles of selections of his
articles, Essays on Money and Inflation (1975), Monetarist
Perspectives (1982), Taking Money Seriously (1990),
Money and Macroeconomics (1997), and Macroeconomics in
Retrospect (2004). He has taken a leading role in the monetarist
tradition of analysis of the crucial role of money in determining
inflation and short-run economic fluctuations ever since, as a doctoral
student at the University of Chicago, he was a research assistant for
Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartzs Monetary History of the United
States, 1867-1960 (1963). David Laidler has been an eloquent
advocate and defender of Friedmans Chicago monetarism both upholding
monetary explanations of inflation, and the absence of longrun real
stimulus from monetary expansion, against Keynesians (Old, New, and
Post) and insisting on the importance of money for short-run real
fluctuations against New Classical claims that any systematic monetary
policy will be neutral. His textbook The Demand for Money - Theories
and Evidence was published in four English language editions from
1969 to 1993, as well as in Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and
Chinese, while his Introduction to Microeconomics had four
English language editions from 1974 to 1994 (the last two co-authored)
and was translated into Spanish, Polish, Italian, and Bulgarian. The
first of his family to attend university, David Laidler grew up in
Newcastle on Tyne, England, where his father had a fish and chips
shop. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Syracuse University,
and the University of Chicago, he has been a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Canada since 1982, and was President of the Canadian Economics
Association in 1987-88. Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics
Society in 2009, David Laidler has championed the need for macroeconomic
theorists and policy analysts to have a historical perspective on how
their field has evolved, notably in his The Golden Age of the
Quantity Theory: The Development of Neoclassical Monetary
Economics, 1870-1914 (1991) and Fabricating the Keynesian
Revolution: Studies of the Inter-war Literature on Money, the Cycle, and
Unemployment (1999). He has also been an influential writer about
Canadian monetary policy: The Great Canadian Disinflation: The
Economics and Politics of Monetary Policy in Canada, 1988-1993
(with William Robson, 1993), shared the first Doug Purvis Memorial Prize
for a work of excellence in Canadian economic policy, and Two
Percent Target: Canadian Monetary Policy Since 1991 (with William
Robson, 2004) won the Donner Prize for outstanding book of the year on
Canadian public policy. After teaching at the University of Manchester
and the University of California, Berkeley, David Laidler joined the
University of Western Ontario in 1975, and was Bank of Montreal
Professor there from 2000 to 2005. Two volumes on David Laidler's
Contributions to Economics have been edited by Robert Leeson
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
© 2018 Canadian Economics Association.
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