Western Economics professors emeriti David Laidler and Michael Parkin have accepted the prestigious title of Fellow of the Canadian Economics Association at the Past Presidents’ Dinner of the association in Calgary on June 7.
Created in 2010, the award recognizes achievements and contributions to the most prominent economists who have spent a significant fraction of their careers in Canada. Both Laidler and Parkin joined Western in 1975.
Laidler received his B.Sc. Econ from the London School of Economics, his M.A. (Economics) from the University of Syracuse and his Ph.D. (Economics) from the University of Chicago. He has been a Scholar in Residence at the C.D. Howe Institute since 1990 and a Fellow in Residence since 1999, in addition to the Canadian Bankers Association Fellow from 2000-03.
He has taught since 1961 and held many full-time, visiting and part-time academic positions. He was an Economics professor at Western for many years, and department chairman for three years. His research interests are the development of Classical, Neoclassical and Keynesian monetary economics, monetary policy regimes, with special reference to Canada and North America. His teaching fields were Canadian macroeconomic policy and history of economic thought. He has published and lectured extensively and been very active with editorial boards of many economic and academic publications.
Parkin studied economics at the University of Leicester from 1960-63 and held appointments at the universities of Sheffield, Leicester, Essex and Manchester before joining Western in 1975. In addition to his visiting appointments at Brown, Stanford and the Hoover Institution in the United States, Parkin has also held visiting posts in Australia, New Zealand, India and Japan.
He is the author of Economics and Foundations of Economics, two of the best-selling introductory texts in economics that are published in dozens of editions and languages around the world, and has published over 160 journal articles and edited volumes.
He still teaches a very popular introductory economics course, Principles of Microeconomics, at Western.