Professor and Head of Public Service and Administration Department
Professor Lori L. Taylor is Head of the Public Service and Administration Department and holds the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Chair in Business and Government at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. She was the director of the Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics, and Public Policy from 2014 to 2018..
Dr. Taylor serves as the Principal Investigator for the Texas Smart Schools Initiative. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Association for Education Finance and Policy, the Editorial Board for AERA Open, the Governing Board of the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southwest, and the Policy Board for Texas Aspires. She is a member of the Holdsworth Center Network of Scholars and the Children At Risk Institute.
Dr. Taylor holds a PhD in economics from the University of Rochester. She earned both a BA in economics and a BS in business administration from the University of Kansas. Prior to joining the Bush School, Dr. Taylor spent fourteen years as an economist and policy advisor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Dr. Taylor has written extensively on variations in the cost of education and the determinants of school district efficiency and has served as a consultant on school finance issues for a variety of legislative committees and state and federal agencies. She was an expert consultant for the Texas Comptroller's Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST) and developed the Comparable Wage Index for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). More recently, she also served as a member of the expert panel for the US Department of Education’s “Study on the Title I Formula.”
Taylor's research on school finance issues has been published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Urban Economics, Economic Inquiry, Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Education Finance, Economics of Education Review, and Peabody Journal of Education. Her paper with Matthew Springer, “Designing Incentives for Public Sector Teachers: Evidence from a Texas Incentive Pay Program,” received the Journal of Education Finance Outstanding Article of the Year Award for 2016.
