Marschak, Jacob

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MARSCHAK, JACOB

MARSCHAK, JACOB (1898–1977), U.S. economist. Born in Kiev, Marschak taught at the University of Heidelberg from 1930 to 1933. From 1933 to 1939 he lectured at All Souls College, Oxford, and was the director of its Institute of Statistics. During this period, his articles on measurement of economic variables and estimation of economic relationships provided the foundation for the field of econometrics. In 1940 he became professor of the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City, which he left in 1942 to teach at the University of Chicago, directing at the same time the Cowles Commission for Economic Research (1943–48). In 1950 he became a consultant of the rand Corporation and a member of an intersociety committee on the training of social scientists in mathematics. He was a professor of economics at Yale from 1955 to 1960. His major interests were microeconomics, econometrics, and business administration. In 1960 he went to teach at the University of California at Los Angeles, with a joint appointment as professor in the School of Business Administration (now Graduate School of Management) and the Department of Economics. He became professor emeritus at ucla in 1965 and served as director of the Western Management Science Institute (1965–69).

Over the years, Marschak served as president of the Econometric Society; vice president of the American Statistical Association; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member of the National Academy of Sciences; and president of the American Economic Association.

In the 1920s Marschak helped a number of his fellow Russian intellectual exiles to establish a life for themselves in the United States. In the 1930s he took part in assisting scholars who were refugees from Nazi Germany. Subsequently, he helped the newer emigrant intellectuals from the Soviet Russia.

Marschak's publications include Kapitalbildung (with Walther Lederer, 1936), Economic Aspects of Atomic Power (co-editor, 1950), Studies in Econometric Methods (with W.C. Hood et al., 1953), Income, Employment, and the Price Level (1965), Economic Theory of Teams (with R. Radner, 1972), and Economic Information, Decision, and Prediction (1974).