Klein, Lawrence Robert

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KLEIN, LAWRENCE ROBERT

KLEIN, LAWRENCE ROBERT (1920– ), U.S. economist, Nobel Prize laureate. Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and received his doctorate from mit in 1944. He served on the faculties of the University of Chicago (1944–47) and the University of Michigan (1949–54). During those periods, he was research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (1948–50) and the Survey Research Center (1949–54). From 1954 to 1958 he was a member of the Oxford Institute of Statistics. In 1958 he was appointed professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1968 he began to serve as a professor of economics and finance at the university's Wharton School. There he built the Wharton model of the U.S. economy, which contains more than a thousand simultaneous equations that are solved by computers. From 1963 to 1972 he was principal investigator for the econometric model project at the Brookings Institute. In 1977 he served as president of the American Economic Association. Klein lectured at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a board member of the Falk Institute for Research in Economics.

Klein received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1980 for "the creation of economic models and their application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies." After retiring from teaching, he was named Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Among his works are The Keynesian Revolution (1947), Textbook of Econometrics (1953), An Econometric Forecasting Model (1967), Essay on the Theory of Economic Production (1968), A Textbook of Econometrics (1974), The Brookings Model (with G. Fromm, 1975), An Introduction to Econometric Forecasting Models (with R. Young, 1980), The Economics of Supply and Demand (1983), Economics in Theory and Practice (1990), A Quest for a More Stable World Economic System (1993), and Modeling Global Change (with F. Lo, 1995).

bibliography:

M. Dutta, Economics, Econometrics, and the Link: Essays in Honor of Lawrence R. Klein (1995); B. Hickman (ed.), Global Econometrics: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Klein (1983).

[Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]