Jan Tinbergen | |
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![]() Jan Tinbergen in 1982 | |
Born | The Hague, Netherlands | 12 April 1903
Died | 9 June 1994 91) The Hague, Netherlands | (aged
Nationality | Dutch |
Alma mater | Leiden University |
Known for | First national macroeconomic model |
Awards | Erasmus Prize (1967) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1969) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Economics, Econometrics |
Institutions | Erasmus University |
Doctoral advisor | Paul Ehrenfest |
Doctoral students | Tjalling Koopmans Hans van den Doel Supachai Panitchpakdi Ashok Mitra |
Influences | Oskar R. Lange |
Jan Tinbergen ( /ˈtɪnbɜːrɡən/ ; Dutch: [ˈtɪnˌbɛrɣə(n)] ; 12 April 1903 –9 June 1994) was a Dutch economist who was awarded the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969, which he shared with Ragnar Frisch for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of econometrics. [1] [2] [3] [4]
His important contributions to econometrics include the development of the first macroeconometric models, the solution of the identification problem, and the understanding of dynamic models. [3] Tinbergen was a founding trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 1945, he founded the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) and was the agency's first director.
Tinbergen was the eldest of five children of Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen and Jeannette van Eek. His brother Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen would also win a Nobel Prize (for physiology, during 1973) for his work in ethology, while his youngest brother Luuk would become a famous ornithologist. Jan and Nikolaas Tinbergen are the only siblings to have both won Nobel Prizes. [5]
Between 1921 and 1925, Tinbergen studied mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest. During those years at Leidenm, he had numerous discussions with Ehrenfest, Kamerlingh Onnes, Hendrik Lorentz, Pieter Zeeman, and Albert Einstein. [6] [7]
After graduating, Tinbergen fulfilled his community service in the administration of a prison in Rotterdam and at the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in The Hague. He then returned to the University of Leiden and in 1929 defended his PhD thesis titled "Minimumproblemen in de natuurkunde en de economie" (Minimisation problems in Physics and Economics). [8] This topic was suggested by Ehrenfest and allowed Tinbergen to combine his interests in mathematics, physics, economics and politics. At that time, CBS established a new department of business surveys and mathematical statistics, and Tinbergen became its first chairman, working at CBS until 1945. Access to the vast CBS data helped Tinbergen in testing his theoretical models. In parallel, starting from 1931, he was professor of statistics at the University of Amsterdam, and in 1933 he was appointed associate professor of mathematics and statistics at The Netherlands School of Economics, Rotterdam, where he stayed until 1973. [6] [7]
From 1929 to 1945 he worked for the Dutch statistical office and briefly served as consultant to the League of Nations (1936–1938). In 1945 he became the first director of the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis and left this position in 1955 to focus on education. He spent one year as a visiting professor at the Harvard University and then returned to the Dutch Economic Institute (the successor of the Netherlands School of Economics). In parallel, he provided consulting services to international organizations and governments of various developing countries, such as United Arab Republic, Turkey, Venezuela, Surinam, Indonesia and Pakistan. [6] [7] [9]
Tinbergen became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1946. [10] He was also a member of the International Academy of Science, Munich. In 1956 he founded the Econometric Institute at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam together with Henri Theil, who also was his successor in Rotterdam. In 1960, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [11] [12] The Tinbergen Institute was named in his honour. The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) awarded its Honorary Fellowship to Jan Tinbergen in 1962. [6] [7] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1963. [13] In 1968, he received an honorary doctorate from Sir George Williams University, which later became Concordia University. [14] He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1974. [15]
For many, Jan Tinbergen became known for the so-called 'Tinbergen Norm' often discussed long after his death. There is no written work of Tinbergen in which he himself states it formally. [16] It is generally believed to be the principle that, if the ratio between the greatest and least income exceeds 5, it becomes disadvantageous for the societal unit involved. Tinbergen himself discussed some technicalities of a five-to-one income distribution ratio in an article published in 1981. [17] Apart from specifics about a five-to-one ratio, it is true in general that Tinbergen's grand theme was income distribution and the search for an optimal social order.
Tinbergen developed the first national comprehensive macroeconomic model, which he first developed in 1936 for the Netherlands, and later applied to the United States and the United Kingdom. [18]
In his work on macroeconomic modelling and economic policy making, Tinbergen classified some economic quantities as targets and others as instruments . [19] Targets are those macroeconomic variables the policy maker wishes to influence, whereas instruments are the variables that the policy maker can control directly. Tinbergen emphasized that achieving the desired values of a certain number of targets requires the policy maker to control an equal number of instruments. This is known as the Tinbergen Rule. [20]
Tinbergen's classification remains influential today, underlying the theory of monetary policy used by central banks. Many central banks today regard the inflation rate as their target; the policy instrument they use to control inflation is the short-term interest rate. [21]
Tinbergen's work on macroeconomic models was later continued by Lawrence Klein, contributing to another Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. For his cultural contributions, he was given the Gouden Ganzenveer in 1985. [22]
Tinbergen's econometric modelling lead to a lively debate with several known participants including J.M. Keynes, Ragnar Frisch and Milton Friedman. The debate is sometime referred to as the Tinbergen debate. [23] [24]
Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch was an influential Norwegian economist known for being one of the major contributors to establishing economics as a quantitative and statistically informed science in the early 20th century. He coined the term econometrics in 1926 for utilising statistical methods to describe economic systems, as well as the terms microeconomics and macroeconomics in 1933, for describing individual and aggregate economic systems, respectively. He was the first to develop a statistically informed model of business cycles in 1933. Later work on the model together with Jan Tinbergen won the two the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969.
Lawrence Robert Klein was an American economist. For his work in creating computer models to forecast economic trends in the field of econometrics in the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1980 specifically "for the creation of econometric models and their application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies." Due to his efforts, such models have become widespread among economists. Harvard University professor Martin Feldstein told the Wall Street Journal that Klein "was the first to create the statistical models that embodied Keynesian economics," tools still used by the Federal Reserve Bank and other central banks.
A macroeconomic model is an analytical tool designed to describe the operation of the problems of economy of a country or a region. These models are usually designed to examine the comparative statics and dynamics of aggregate quantities such as the total amount of goods and services produced, total income earned, the level of employment of productive resources, and the level of prices.
Tjalling Charles Koopmans was a Dutch-American mathematician and economist. He was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of the optimum allocation of resources. Koopmans showed that on the basis of certain efficiency criteria, it is possible to make important deductions concerning optimum price systems.
Erasmus University Rotterdam is a public research university located in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The university is named after Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, a 15th-century humanist and theologian.
Henri (Hans) Theil was a Dutch econometrician and professor at the Netherlands School of Economics in Rotterdam, known for his contributions to the field of econometrics.
Pieter (Piet) Rietveld was a Dutch economist and Professor in Transport Economics at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and a fellow at the Tinbergen Institute. He was among the top researchers in economic geography according to IDEAS/RePEc.
The Tinbergen Institute is a joint institute for research and education in economics, econometrics and finance of the VU University Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam, and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. The institute was founded in 1987 and is named after the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, a Nobel prize-winning professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Following the development of Keynesian economics, applied economics began developing forecasting models based on economic data including national income and product accounting data. In contrast with typical textbook models, these large-scale macroeconometric models used large amounts of data and based forecasts on past correlations instead of theoretical relations. These models estimated the relations between different macroeconomic variables using regression analysis on time series data. These models grew to include hundreds or thousands of equations describing the evolution of hundreds or thousands of prices and quantities over time, making computers essential for their solution. While the choice of which variables to include in each equation was partly guided by economic theory, variable inclusion was mostly determined on purely empirical grounds. Large-scale macroeconometric model consists of systems of dynamic equations of the economy with the estimation of parameters using time-series data on a quarterly to yearly basis.
Bernard Marinus Siegfried van Praag is a Dutch economist, and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Amsterdam, noted for researching the measurement of welfare, as well-being and happiness.
Econometric Institute at the Erasmus University Rotterdam is a leading research institute in the fields of econometrics and management science in the Netherlands. The Institute offers advanced education in econometrics. It was founded in 1956 by Henri Theil in cooperation with Jan Tinbergen.
Willem Hendrik Somermeyer was a Dutch economist, Professor in Econometrics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, particularly known for his consumption-savings model.
Teunis (Teun) Kloek is a Dutch economist and Emeritus Professor of Econometrics at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. His research interests centered on econometric methods and their applications, especially nonparametric and robust methods in econometrics.
Coenraad Nicolaas (Coen) Teulings is a Dutch economist and distinguished professor at Utrecht University. He was formerly professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Cambridge and former Director of the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, as well as Chairman of Merifin Capital.
Wim Driehuis is a Dutch economist, Emeritus Professor Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam.
Jan Salomon (Mars) Cramer was a Dutch economist, Professor of Statistics and Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam, known for his work of empirical econometrics.
Nicola Acocella is an Italian economist and academic, Emeritus Professor of Economic Policy since 2014.
Guido Wilhelmus Imbens is a Dutch-American economist whose research concerns econometrics and statistics. He holds the Applied Econometrics Professorship in Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 2012.
Andrew Jonathan Hughes Hallett FRSE was a British economist. He was University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at George Mason University, Senior Research Fellow at Kings College and Honorary Professor of Economics at the University of St Andrews He was also a member of the Scottish Growth Commission.
The 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was divided one half awarded to the American-Canadian David Card "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", the other half jointly to Israeli-American Joshua Angrist and Dutch-American Guido W. Imbens "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships." The Nobel Committee stated their reason behind the decision, saying:
"This year's Laureates – David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens – have shown that natural experiments can be used to answer central questions for society, such as how minimum wages and immigration affect the labour market. They have also clarified exactly which conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn using this research approach. Together, they have revolutionised empirical research in the economic sciences."