David Laidler

Professor Emeritus

Research Interests

The Development of Classical, Neoclassical and Keynesian Monetary Economics; Monetary Policy Regimes, with special reference to Canada and North America

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). He
has been a leader 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. Schwartz's Monetary History of the United
States, 1867–1960 (1963). David Laidler has been an eloquent advocate and
defender of Friedman's Chicago monetarism both upholding monetary explanations
of inflation, and the absence of long-run 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 influence was extended,
in part, through his textbooks The Demand for Money – Theories and Evidence
and Introduction to Microeconomics*, both of which went through four English
language editions and were published in numerous other languages. The first of
his family to attend university, David Laidler grew up in Newcastle upon 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. 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).