Christopher Ragan

Chris is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at McGill University. He is the chair of Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, which launched in November 2014 with a five-year mandate to identify policy options to improve environmental and economic performance in Canada. He is also a member of the federal finance minister’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which began in early 2016.

Chris  is also a research fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute. From 2010 to 2013, he held the Institute’s David Dodge Chair in Monetary Policy, and for many years he was a member of the Institute’s Monetary Policy Council. In 2009-10, he was the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at Finance Canada, and in 2004-05 he served as special advisor to the governor of the Bank of Canada. In 2010-11, he was president of the Ottawa Economics Association.

Chris’s published research focuses mostly on the conduct of macroeconomic policy. His 2004 book, co-edited with William Watson, is called Is the Debt War Over? In 2007, he published A Canadian Priorities Agenda, co-edited with Jeremy Leonard and France St-Hilaire from the Institute for Research on Public Policy.  He is the author of Economics (formerly co-authored with Richard Lipsey), which after 15 editions is still the most widely used introductory economics textbook in Canada. Chris also has a regular economics column in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Chris teaches regularly for McKinsey & Company in its internal MBA program. He also teaches in EDHEC Business School’s Global MBA program in France. In 2007, Ragan was awarded the Noel Fieldhouse teaching prize at McGill University.

Chris received his BA in economics in 1984 from the University of Victoria and his MA in economics from Queen’s University in 1985. He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he completed his PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.