Taylor has written or edited 10 books, and over 50 journal articles, on problems in international economics, trade, finance, growth and macroeconomics, often in combination with his other major field of economic history. He has been a lecturer/visitor with central banks and international organizations, served on many editorial boards, held multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, and has been funded by other grant making bodies, including the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is the author, with Robert Feenstra, of the widely used textbookInternational Economics.
In the 1990s Taylor made contributions to Argentine economic history, starting with his thesis research which was awarded the Gerschenkron Prize by the Economic History Association. His work focused on long-term real and financial factors in slow development after 1914, and he challenged the conventional view that relative divergence began only after 1945 in the Perón era and later. He went on to collaborate extensively with Gerardo della Paolera, with whom he wrote several papers, published one book, and one edited volume. Their work was recognized with the Cole Prize by the Economic History Association.
In the mid-1990s Taylor began a fruitful collaboration with Obstfeld tackling the evolution of global financial integration and macroeconomics in the very long run. Their work was recognized with the Sanwa Prize and published in several articles and a book. In 1997, Obstfeld and Taylor were the first to introduce the now-standard term "trilemma" into economics, which is used to describe the macroeconomic policy tradeoff between fixed exchange rates, open capital markets, and monetary policy autonomy. In work with Jay Shambaugh, they developed the first methods to empirically validate this central, yet hitherto untested, hypothesis in international macroeconomics.
Economics of exchange rates
Since the late 1990s Taylor has a strand of work focusing on exchange rate economics. He has written several influential papers looking at the long-run behavior of exchange rates and the purchasing-power parity hypothesis. More recently he has written on the short-run behavior of exchange rates, in particular to evaluate the carry trade and other currency trading strategies. In both short- and long-run settings he has explored the role of nonlinear dynamics in exchange rate determination. His main collaborators in this area have been Obstfeld, Mark Taylor and Òscar Jordà.
Taylor’s work since the Global Financial Crisis has looked at the role of bank lending as it relates to financial crisis events and recessions. The team of Taylor and Moritz Schularick constructed the first long-run dataset of aggregate bank credit for 14 countries dating back 1870, and in their 2012 paper they showed not only how credit had grown to unprecedented levels in the advanced economies in 2008, but that throughout modern history rates of credit expansion have been a robust predictor of financial crises. Collaborating with Jordà they have shown that more intense credit booms tend to result in longer and more painful recessions, all else equal, a pattern that is consistent with the deep post-2008 downturns seen in many advanced economies.
