[2] On 16 August 2024 Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves appointed Taylor to be an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England with effect from September 2024.

Born and raised in Yorkshire, Taylor attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield, and went up to King's College, Cambridge, on an Open Scholarship.

He took leave from academia to be a senior advisor at Morgan Stanley in 2010–11 based in New York and London where he worked on global macro and emerging markets.

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.

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.

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.