John B. Taylor is one of the field’s most inspiring teachers. As the Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, Professor Taylor teaches a yearly introductory economics course about which students are wildly enthusiastic. His distinctive instructional methods have made him a legend among students and have won him both the Hoagland and the Rhodes prizes for teaching excellence. As a recent Wall Street Journal article put it, Taylor’s ‘sober appearance . . . belies a somewhat zany teaching style’. Few of his students forget how he first illustrated a shift of the demand curve — by dressing up as a California raisin and dancing to ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’— or how he proved that the supply and demand model actually works by having student buyers and sellers call out live bids to him in the classroom. It is this gift for clear explanations and memorable illustrations that makes his textbook so useful to students.

Professor Taylor is also widely recognised for his research. He has created formulae for wage and price setting and models for economic policy evaluation. One of his well-known research contributions is a rule, now widely called the Taylor Rule, which is used at central banks around the world. He is currently Vice President of the American Economic Association and is undertaking research on why economic expansions are becoming longer.

Taylor has an active public service career, having held several high-profile policy positions. He has served as economic advisor to the Governor of his state (California), to the US Congressional Budget Office and to the President of the United States. He is also asked for his advice by policymakers abroad. He has travelled to meet with heads of the central banks of Brazil, Chile, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, Russia and the European Monetary Union.

Professor Taylor began his career at Princeton, where he graduated with highest honours in economics. He then received his PhD from Stanford and taught at Columbia, Yale and Princeton before returning to Stanford where he now teaches.

Paul Dalziel has been researching and teaching New Zealand macroeconomics since completing his PhD at Otago University in 1985. He has edited or co-authored three books on domestic economic policy – The Decent Society? (1992), Redesigning the Welfare State (1996) and The New Zealand Macroeconomy (4th edn, 2002). He is the author of Money, Credit and Price Stability (2001), written with the assistance of a research grant from the prestigious Marsden Fund. Professor Dalziel has also published more than 30 academic articles and book chapters, mostly related to aspects of New Zealand’s economic reforms introduced after 1984.

Professor Dalziel is well known for his willingness to speak to community groups and the media on economic issues. He regularly attends monetary policy seminars at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and has been a member of the employment working group of the New Zealand Planning Council, the macroeconomic forecasting advisory panel of the New Zealand Treasury and the Christchurch Mayoral Taskforce on Poverty. He is currently a council member of the New Zealand Association of Economists.

Like Professor Taylor, Paul Dalziel is an enthusiastic teacher of economics. His students consistently praise the clarity, organisation and relevance of his lectures. He has been teaching introductory macroeconomics since 1985, including classes at Otago, Canterbury and Lincoln Universities. He currently holds the chair of economics in the Commerce Division at Lincoln University.