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Michael Parkin

Professor Emeritus
M.A. University of Leicester, 1970

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.

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

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