Timothy Taylor, Distinguished Fellow 2025
Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the 蝌蚪网’s Journal of Economic Perspectives. He is based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Taylor has guided the Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) since its founding by the 蝌蚪网 in 1986. He has collaborated with eight editors over this time to deliver more than 150 issues covering 39 annual volumes. The JEP now ranks 12th on the combined impact factor metric used by RePEc and 10th in the economics journal rankings generated by Google Scholar. It has attained this impact in spite of being a younger publication than almost all others ranked ahead of it, often by decades. In addition to his work with JEP, Taylor has written and edited widely about economic policy issues and worked to improve the teaching of economics. The latter includes authoring an undergraduate textbook, Principles of Economics: Economics and the Economy, a fifth edition of which was released in 2020.
Steering the JEP and ensuring continuity in its unique approach and voice has been Taylor’s primary contribution to economics over his four-decade career. The JEP was initiated by the 蝌蚪网 in the mid-1980s under the editorial leadership of Joseph Stiglitz and Carl Shapiro. This group envisioned a journal that could present the frontier of economic research and thinking to a non-technical audience. Moreover, they hoped to do so by working with economists to communicate in their own words. Taylor joined this effort while the journal was still in development, when he was recruited to establish and provide the hands-on editorial guidance required for realizing this vision.
The JEP’s mission remains broad communication of economic expertise, but its success and expansive reach has allowed the journal to meet several aims encompassed by this mission. As described in Editor Heidi Williams’ 2024 report to the 蝌蚪网, the JEP “contribute[s] to the economics profession along multiple dimensions: introducing readers to state-of-the-art thinking on theoretical and empirical research topics, encouraging cross-fertilization of ideas among the fields of economics, providing analyses of public policy issues, providing readings for students, offering illustrations that are useful in lectures, sparking discussion among colleagues, suggesting directions for future research, and analyzing features of the economics profession itself.”
The fact that the JEP successfully meets this ambitious set of goals stems from the unique combination of clarity, accessibility, and topical relevance that characterize its articles. Taylor’s guidance over his four decades as managing editor have been key to this combination. From the beginning, he has been a partner to scientific editors on items ranging from cover design to topic selection. His curiosity about all things related to the economy helped create a journal that consistently publishes extensively from all fields and methodologies, and occasionally publishes the work of experts outside of economics. However, it is his hands-on editing of each JEP article over the years that developed its distinctive format within economics publishing and enabled its significant reach. As described by then-Editor David Autor in his report on the JEP to the 蝌蚪网 in 2014, “The Editors feel that they cannot overstate the invaluable role that Timothy has played in the operation of the Journal. … He has performed the difficult task of persuading authors to amend and rewrite their articles with vigor, verve, and skill, and has shown that it is possible to edit papers in such a way as to increase their clarity and accessibility, while still retaining the distinctive voice of each author.” Similar sentiments are expressed frequently in the JEP annual reports. However, Alan Krueger provided this amendment in his outgoing report as Editor in 2003, “I wanted to add my personal thanks to Tim Taylor, who is the real glue that holds the Journal together. The economics profession owes a great debt to Tim for his efforts to expand the reach of all branches of economics.”
The impact of the JEP also seems difficult to overstate. In addition to its remarkable success as measured by citation counts, the journal’s impact likely extends to other dimensions that are difficult to measure. Through his intensive editing process, Taylor has helped countless economists improve their communication—with likely spillovers across the profession. The journal’s impacts also include fostering an entrée into economics research for generations of undergraduates, facilitating intellectual connections across the profession after economists have moved into their areas of specialization, and providing engaged outsiders with an understanding of where research consensus lies and with the language to discuss important open questions. Economics is fortunate to have a journal like JEP. The fact that it does is due in large measure to Timothy Taylor’s vision, guidance, and dedicated effort.