Professor Karl Taylor

School of Economics

Professor of Economics

Karl Taylor profile
Profile picture of Karl Taylor profile
k.b.taylor@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 3420
+44 114 222 3458 (fax)
Room 519, 9 Mappin Street

Full contact details

Professor Karl Taylor
School of Economics
Room 519
9 Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 4DT
Profile

Karl graduated from Staffordshire University with BA Economics, then gained his MA Economics from Staffordshire and PhD in Economics from the Open University under joint supervision with Cardiff University.

He worked at the University of Leicester from 2001 to 2005, where he was initially a Lecturer before being promoted to a Senior Lecturer. Karl was initially appointed to a Readership in September 2005 at the University of Sheffield and was subsequently promoted to a Personal Chair in January 2009.

Karl was the coordinator of the DWP-sponsored Work, Pensions and Labour Economics Study Group (WPEG) from 2010 until 2020 and remains a member of the WPEG Steering Group.  

Karl has completed research projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Leverhulme Trust, the Home Office and the Department for Health.

He was a research associate at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Essex) from 2006 to 2008 and a member of the Grant Assessment Panel C of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 2016 to 2020.

Karl is currently on the Advisory Board of Economic Issues and since 2022 is an Associate Editor of the Bulletin of Economic Research. He is also a member of the Department for International Trade ODI Advisory Group, a member of the Money and Pensions Service Research Evaluation Group, and since 2009 has been a research fellow at the IZA (Institute for the Study of Labour, Bonn).

Research interests

Karl's research interests lie in the area of applied microeconometrics focusing on labour economics, the economics of education and, household financial decision-making. His research has focused on individual, household and firm-level data including matched workplace-employee data.

Examples of research projects include empirical analysis of the reservation wages of the unemployed (ESRC) and empirical analysis of wage growth, human capital and risk aversion (Leverhulme Trust).

He has been involved in advisory reports for the Home Office and more recently the Department of Health looking at the minimum pricing of alcohol.

Karl is interested in supervising PhD students in applied microeconometrics.

Publications

Journal articles

Working papers

  • Brown S, Bucciol A, Montagnoli A & Taylor K (2020) Financial advice and household financial portfolios. The Sheffield Economic Research Paper Series (SERPS), 2020009. View this article in WRRO RIS download Bibtex download

Preprints

Teaching interests

I currently teach postgraduate econometrics. Econometrics is an essential part of an economists toolkit and includes a fascinating set of techniques which enables the measurement and analysis of economic phenomena.

As economists we use econometrics to describe economic reality, test hypotheses about economic theory, and to forecast the future.

This can be at the micro level, e.g. estimating a demand function, or at the macro level, e.g. estimating a Keynesian consumption function. At both the undergraduate and postgraduate level students are introduced to Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), the main method for regression analysis.

I also cover the potential problems associated with OLS and possible solutions. In my postgraduate course in more advanced topics we also consider modelling discrete rather than continuous variables.

My approach to teaching is that concepts which initially students may find challenging are always taught via theory followed by examples in lectures and are subsequently reinforced via computer practicals where students have the opportunity to estimate models.

Throughout my teaching where possible I link to my research, e.g. estimating demand functions is explicitly linked to the research I have undertaken on alcohol.

  • ECN6540 Econometric Methods