M. Scott Taylor

M. Scott Taylor is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Calgary, a past president of the Canadian Economics Association, and director of the Kuehne Center for Sustainable Trade & Logistics at the University of Zurich (2023/24). He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a fellow of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, and a CESifo associate at the Ifo Institute, Germany. From 2004 to 2018, he held the Canada Research Chair in International, Energy and Environmental Economics, and in 2014, was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), the highest honour that can be attained by scholars, artists, and scientists in Canada. In 2010, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Basel, Switzerland, for his pioneering work on trade, the environment, and renewable resources. In 2024, he was made a fellow of the Canadian Economics Association, the highest honor conferred by the Association.

A marked feature of his research is the use of novel methods and data to evaluate hypotheses that were previously unexplored. For example, his earliest work explains the enormous variation we see in pollution levels across countries by tying it to differences across countries in their pattern of international trade and economic growth. Another early and still ongoing branch of research explains why some countries fail and others succeed in managing their natural resources. In the 1990s, this led him (and co-author James Brander) to spearhead research linking natural resource overuse led to the rise and fall of prehistoric societies, focusing first on the case of Easter Island. More recently, he has shown how international trade, a new tanning innovation, and a lack of property rights were responsible for the late 19th-century slaughter of over 10 million North American Bison. Some of his current work investigates the link between noise pollution created by international shipping and the health of whale populations.

Professor Taylor’s publications have appeared in the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, International Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Canadian Journal of Economics, and Resource and Energy Economics.

Prior to his current position, Taylor was a full professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1998-2004) and an assistant, associate, and full professor in the Department of Economics at the University of British Columbia (1992 – 1998). He has also been a visiting scholar in the Princeton Department of Economics (1991, 2003) and a Killam Postdoctoral fellow at the Sauder Business School at the University of British Columbia (1991). From 1995 to 1998, he was a scholar in the Economic Growth Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.