John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is also the director of Stanford's Introductory Economics Center. His research focuses on macroeconomics, monetary economics and international economics. He co-edited Volume 1 of the Handbook of Macroeconomics and recently wrote Getting Off Track, one of the first books on the financial crisis, and First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity. He served as senior economist and Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 2001 to 2005, he served as undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury for international affairs. Taylor was awarded the Hoagland Prize and the Rhodes Prize by Stanford University for excellence in undergraduate teaching and the Stanford Economics Department Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He received the Truman Medal for Economic Policy for extraordinary contribution to the formation and conduct of economic policy, the Bradley Prize for his economic research and policy achievements, the Adam Smith Award from the National Association for Business Economics, the Alexander Hamilton Award and the Treasury Distinguished Service Award for his policy contributions at the US Treasury, and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay for his work in resolving the 2002 financial crisis. Taylor received a BA in economics summa cum laude from Princeton and a PhD in economics from Stanford. Michael Woodford is the John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. His first academic appointment was at Columbia in 1984, after which he held positions at the University of Chicago and Princeton University, before returning to Columbia in 2004. He received his A.B. from the University of Chicago, his J.D. from Yale Law School, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.), and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London). In 2007 he was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics. Woodford’s primary research interests are in macroeconomic theory and monetary policy. He has written extensively about the microeconomic foundations of the monetary transmission mechanism, the role of interest rates in inflation determination, rules for the conduct of monetary policy, central-bank communication policy, interactions between monetary and fiscal policy, and the consequences of electronic payments for monetary control. His most important work is the treatise Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy, recipient of the 2003 Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Economics. He is the co-editor of the Handbook in Economics series.
