Michael Parkin

Professor Emeritus
On Leave July, 2012 to July 2013

Research Interests

Monetary and Exchange Rate Policy; Rational Expectations

Michael Parkin has been a member of the Economics Department at the University
of Western Ontario since coming to Canada from the United Kingdom in
1975. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he was a cost accountant in the
English steel industry for five years, and in 1960 he began studying economics at
the University of Leicester (to which he returned to accept an honorary doctorate
in 2010). From 1970 to 1975 he was Professor of Economics at the University
of Manchester. Starting in the late 1960s, he became a vigorous and influential
proponent of the monetarist school of thought, which at the time was widely
considered to be far from the mainstream of macroeconomics, especially in the
UK. He quickly rose to be one of the global leaders of this movement, solidifying
his reputation with the authoritative survey of inflation that he wrote with
David Laidler, which placed the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve at the
centre of inflation theory and that appeared in the Economic Journal in 1975.
After arriving in Canada, he quickly became a leading contributor to public
debate on monetary policy while continuing to make important contributions
to a variety of topics, both empirical and theoretical. These contributions, combined
with energetic and generous encouragement of his younger colleagues and
students, helped to elevate Western's macro group to a pre-eminent position in
Canada. His paper in the Journal of Political Economy, "The output-inflation
trade-off when prices are costly to change" (1986) is widely recognized as being
one of the first to introduce optimal price adjustment into a rational-expectations
macro model and was influential in the formulation of the first generation of
New Keynesian DSGE Models. The author of almost 150 published articles (including New Palgrave articles on adaptive expectations and on inflation), he is
also the author or co-author (often with Dr Robin Bade) of eighty (80!) editions,
in many languages and national editions, of two best-selling textbooks: Economics
and Modern Macroeconomics. Managing editor of the Canadian Journal
of Economics from 1982 to 1987, he was president of the Canadian Economics
Association in 1997–98; his presidential address, "Unemployment, inflation, and
monetary policy" (CJE 1998), reflected on developments in macroeconomic theory
and proposed the extension of existing dynamic general equilibrium models
to a richer vector of stochastic shocks as a path to developing quantitative models
adequate to informing the design and conduct of monetary policy.

Reprinted from the Canadian Journal of Economics, Vol. 46, No. 1, February 2013: 2-3.

Central Bank Laws and Monetary Policy (October, 1988 with Robin Bade)

Central Bank Laws and Monetary Policy Outcomes: A Three Decade Perspective, December 2012

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