Mark P. Taylor is the Donald Danforth, Jr Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis, USA. He was previously Dean of the Olin Business School and, before that, Dean and Professor of Finance and Economics at of Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, UK. He obtained his first degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University and a Master's and Doctoral degrees in economics and finance from London University.. Professor Taylor has taught economics at various universities (including Warwick, Oxford, Marseille and New York), at various levels (from principles courses to advanced graduate and MBA courses) and in various fields (including macroeconomics, microeconomics and econometrics). He has also worked as a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund and at the Bank of England and as a managing director at BlackRock, the world's largest financial asset manager, where he ran a global investment fund based on macroeconomic analysis. His work has been extensively published in scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Political Economy and the Economic Journal, and he is today one of the most highly cited economists in the world in economic research. In addition, Professor Taylor has acted as an advisor to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of England, the European Commission and to senior members of the UK government. He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a member of council of the Royal Economic Society and a fellow of both the Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Society of Arts.