Monetary Policy Council Member

David Laidler Fellow-in-Residence

David Laidler is Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, where he was Professor of Economics from 1975 until 2004. He was educated at the London School of Economics (B.Sc. (econ.) 1959), the University of Syracuse (M.A. 1960), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1964). Prior to joining the UWO faculty in 1975, he held full-time academic appointments at the London School of Economics (assistant lecturer 1960-1961), the University of California at Berkeley (assistant professor 1963-1966), the University of Essex (lecturer 1966-1969), and the University of Manchester (professor 1969-1975). In 1998 and 1999, he was Visiting Economist and Special Adviser at the Bank of Canada. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1981.

Professor Laidler's fields of interest are monetary economics and its history. He has written numerous academic articles and books in these areas, including The Demand for Money (1969, 4th ed 1993), The Golden Age of the Quantity Theory (1991), and Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution: Studies of the Interwar Literature on Money, the Cycle and Unemployment (1999). Professor Laidler has been responsible, alone and in collaboration with members of the C.D. Howe Institute staff, for a large number of Institute publications on monetary policy questions. The Great Canadian Disinflation: The Economics and Politics of Monetary Policy in Canada, 1988-93 (1993), co-authored with William Robson, was awarded the Canadian Economics Association's Doug Purvis Memorial Prize for excellence in writing on Canadian economic policy in 1994. Laidler and Robson's new book Two Per Cent Target: Canadian Monetary Policy since 1991 was published by the Institute in August 2004, was shortlisted for the Purvis Prize, and was awarded the Donner Prize for the best book on a Canadian Public Policy Issue published in that year.