The field of econometrics is concerned with estimating economic relations and testing whether postulated relations conform fully with reality. In an article in Econometrica in 1943 and in his doctoral thesis entitled, The Probability Approach in Econometrics (1944), Haavelmo showed that the results of many of the methods used thus far had been misleading. Earlier…

My youthI was born May 31, 1911, in Paris. My parents owned a small cheese shop, and my maternal grandfather was a carpentry worker. I thus came from what is commonly known as the working class. In August 1914, my father was called to war, and then taken prisoner. He died in captivity in Germany…

I was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 23, 1924, the oldest of three children. My parents were themselves the children of immigrants. They had to earn a living as soon as they finished secondary school. So my sisters, my cousins and I were the first generation of our family to attend a university.…

  Born: October 3, 1919, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA Civil Status: Married (to Ann Bakke Buchanan on 5 October 1945), no children     Education 1948 Ph. D., University of Chicago 1941 M. S., University of Tennessee 1940 B. A., Middle Tennessee State College     Current position and title General Director, Center for Study of…

I was born in London on 30 August 1913, the only child of Gilbert and Elsie Stone. My school days were spent first at Cliveden Place Preparatory School and then at Westminster School, which I attended from 1926 to 1930. At Westminster, I was on the classical side: my father, who was a barrister, destined…

I was born in 1921 in Calais, France, the son of Camille Debreu and Fernande (née Decharne) Debreu. My father was the business partner of my maternal grandfather in lace manufacturing, a traditional industry in Calais. My paternal grandfather managed, until his retirement, the printing plant he had created in the small town of Marquise…

I was born in Renton, a suburb of Seattle, Washington, in 1911. I was the only child of Joseph and Elizabeth Stigler, who had separately migrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century, my father from Bavaria and my mother from what was then Austria-Hungary (and her mother was in fact…

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis. At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For…

The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics. In the Dakotas, where I was born (April 30, 1902), I learned during my youth how hard it was for farm families to stay solvent. Farm product prices fell abruptly by more than half. Banks went bankrupt and many farmers suffered foreclosures.…

I was born in St. Lucia on January 23, 1915. My parents, who were both school teachers, had immigrated there from Antigua about a dozen years before. The islands were dissimilar in religion and culture, so our family had some slight characteristics of immigrant minorities. My progress through the public schools was accelerated. When I…