Lawrence Klein

Lawrence Klein
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Doctoral advisor	Paul Samuelson
Doctoral students	Arthur Goldberger Bennett Harrison Ignazio Visco E. Roy Weintraub
Influences	Jan Tinbergen
Contributions	Macroeconometric forecasting models
Awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1959) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1980)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

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Lawrence Robert Klein (September 14, 1920 – October 20, 2013) was an American

Life and career

Klein was born in

Early model-building

Klein then moved to the

]

Klein briefly joined the Communist Party during the 1940s, which led to trouble years later.

At the

McCarthyism and move to England

In 1954, Klein's brief membership in the Communist Party was made public[1] and he was denied tenure at the University of Michigan, in the wake of the McCarthy era. Klein moved to the University of Oxford, and developed an economic model of the United Kingdom known as the Oxford model with Sir James Ball. Additionally, at the Institute of Statistics Klein assisted with the creation of the British Savings Surveys, based upon the Michigan Surveys.

Return to the U.S.

In 1958 Klein returned to the U.S. to join the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1959 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, one of the two most prestigious awards in the field of economics. In 1968 he became the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Economics and Finance at Penn.

Brookings-SSRC Project

In the early 1960s Klein became the leader of the major "Brookings-SSRC Project" to construct a detailed econometric model to forecast the short-term development of the U.S. economy.

Wharton

Later in the '60s, Klein constructed the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Model. This model, considerably smaller than the Brookings model, achieved a very good reputation for its analysis of business conditions, used to forecast fluctuations including national product, exports, investments, and consumption, and to study the effect on them of changes in taxation, public expenditure, oil price, etc.

In 1969 Klein founded

project, a consortium of model builders from many countries, which was also mentioned in his Nobel citation. The aim was to produce the world's first global economic model, linking models of many of the world's countries so that the effect of changes in the economy of one country are reflected in the other. LINK, which is now operated by the United Nations, is still meeting regularly, most recently in September 2018 in Santiago, Chile.

Klein served as a thesis advisor for numerous well-known economists including E. Roy Weintraub in the late 1960s.^{[citation needed]}

Later career

During the 1976 United States presidential election, Klein coordinated Jimmy Carter's economic task force. He declined an invitation to join Carter's administration. Klein has also been president of the Econometric Society. the International Atlantic Economic Society (1989–1990), and the American Economic Association (in 1977).

His Nobel citation concludes that "few, if any, research workers in the empirical field of economic science, have had so many successors and such a large impact as Lawrence Klein". However,

has criticized the assumptions underlying large macro-econometric models built by Klein (Sims, 1980). Also, many economists have questioned the suitability of estimation methods employed by large structural models and the usefulness of simple autoregressive models for approximating economic systems.

In his final years, he was constructing short range "current quarter models" that use current economic indicators to get a handle on the rate of economic growth during the current and next quarter. In contrast to earlier efforts to model the economy structurally and to use constant adjustments and judgmental estimates for the exogenous variables, these systems are deliberately automatic and mechanical, simply translating available information into a statistically best estimate of current conditions. This represents a very different tradition from his earlier model building and applications.

After formal retirement and until his death he was engaged in macro econometric model building high-frequency models that project the economy in a monthly, quarterly frame. A publication on high frequency model containing countries such as US, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Korea and Hong Kong was expected in 2008.

Klein was a founding trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,^[6] the American Philosophical Society,^[7] and the United States National Academy of Sciences.^[8]

He died at the age of 93 in his home on October 20, 2013.^[9]

Publications

• Klein, Lawrence Robert (1970). An essay on the theory of economic prediction. Markham economics series (American ed.).
  LCCN 73122300
  .
• Economic Fluctuations in the United States, 1921–41 (1950)
• An Econometric Model of the United States, 1929–52 (with AS Goldberger, 1955)
• The Keynesian revolution (1947)
  ISBN 0-333-08131-5
  • Klein, Lawrence (1966) [1947]. The Keynesian revolution (2d ed.). New York:
    OL 5988755M
    .
• The Wharton Econometric Forecasting Model (with MK Evans, 1967)
• A Textbook of Econometrics (1973)
  ISBN 0-13-912832-8
• The Brookings Model (With Gary Fromm. 1975)
• Econometric Model Performance (1976)
• An Introduction to Econometric Forecasting and Forecasting Models (1980)
  ISBN 0-669-02896-7
• Econometric Models As Guides for Decision Making (1982)
  ISBN 0-02-917430-9
• The Economics of Supply and Demand 1983
• Economics, Econometrics and The LINK (with M Dutta, 1995)
  ISBN 0-444-81787-5
• China and India: Two Asian Economic Giants, Two Different Systems (2004). Article free downloadable at the journal Applied Econometrics and International Development http://www.usc.es/economet/aeid.htm

See also

• List of economists
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates

References

Further reading

• Breit, William; Hirsch, Barry T., eds. (2004). Lives of the Laureates (4th ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
  ISBN 0-262-52450-3
  .
• Karayiannis, Anastassios D. (2009). "A Synopsis of Lawrence R. Klein's Thoughts and Contributions to Economics". In Puttaswamaiah, K. (ed.). Growth of Economics in the Twentieth Century. Enfield: Isle. pp. 579–592.
  ISBN 978-0-9823895-2-2
  .
• "Lawrence Klein Papers, 1950s–2000". Rubenstein Library, Duke University.
• Sims, C. (1980). Marcoeconomics and reality. Econometrica, 48, 1-48.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Lawrence Klein.

• Lawrence Klein
• Economists for Peace and Security
• Lawrence Klein at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• IDEAS/RePEc
• "Lawrence Robert Klein (1920– )".
  Library of Economics and Liberty (2nd ed.). Liberty Fund
  . 2008.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Lawrence R. Klein on Nobelprize.org

Awards
Preceded by Sir Arthur Lewis	Laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics 1980	Succeeded by James Tobin