Stephen is the CEO and Chief Economist at CSLS. He previously served as Chief Economist and SVP of Research, Data and Analytics at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, where he launched and managed the Business Data Lab.
Stephen is the President of the Canadian Association for Business Economics and a member of the Canadian Statistics Advisory Council. He has 25 years of diverse experience at many of Canada’s top economic organizations including: Export Development Canada as the Deputy Chief Economist, the Bank of Canada, Parliamentary Budget Office, Finance Canada, academia, and other think tanks, such as the Institute for Research on Public Policy and the C.D. Howe Institute.
Stephen’s research was awarded the Purvis prize for Canadian economic policy and has been published in academic journals, including the Canadian Journal of Economics and Canadian Public Policy. He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Queen’s University and an Honours B.A. in Economics with Distinction from Western University.
Stephen Tapp; Bart van Ark; Paul SchreyerIPM Issue 50 | Spring 2026 | pp. 1–4
Issue 50 marks the IPM’s 25th anniversary — having published 350 articles since 2000 — and the transition to a new editorial team (Stephen Tapp joins as Managing Editor, replacing Andrew Sharpe who founded the journal). The issue covers five broad themes: GenAI and productivity (Baily et al.); the productivity J-curve and digitalization from an international…
Remi Royer; Stephen TappReport 2026-03 | September 2026 | 47 pages | Labour Markets
Canada’s youth labour market has deteriorated sharply since early 2023, with weakness concentrated among teenagers. This report by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards documents the stylized facts of the deterioration and seeks to explain it. By mid-2026, the unemployment rate for 15–19-year-olds exceeded 20%, while teenage employment and participation rates fell to their…
Andrew Sharpe; Stephen TappReport 2025-04 | November 2025 | 45 pages | Fiscal Policy, Productivity and Economic Measurement
Over the past half century, Canada’s labour productivity growth has slowed dramatically, falling from 3.7 per cent annually in 1947–73 to less than 1 per cent since 2000. This paper asks whether weak public policy explains that decline and whether new pro-productivity policies could reverse it. Using long-run data and the policy typology of Van Ark…
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