William Arnold Barnett (born October 30, 1941) is an American economist, whose current work is in the fields of chaos, bifurcation, and nonlinear dynamics in socioeconomic contexts, econometric modeling of consumption and production, and the study of the aggregation problem and the challenges of measurement in economics.
Barnett received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from M.I.T., his M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Barnett is currently the Oswald Distinguished Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Kansas and Director of the Center for Financial Stability, in New York City. He is also a Fellow of the TANDO Institute and a Fellow of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. He is the Founder and was First President of the Society for Economic Measurement. He is also the Director of the Institute for Nonlinear Dynamical Inference, founded at RUDN University in Moscow but now at the University of Kansas.
He was previously a research economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.; Stuart Centennial Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin; and Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to becoming an economist, he worked from 1963 to 1969, as an engineer at Rocketdyne division of the Rockwell International Corporation on development of the F-1 and J-2 rocket engines during Apollo program.
His research is in macroeconomics and econometrics. He is Founding President of the Society for Economic Measurement, Founding Editor of the Cambridge University Press journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics and of the Emerald Group Publishing monograph series, International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics, and originator of the Divisia monetary aggregates and the "Barnett critique". [1] [2]
In consumer demand and production modelling, he originated the Laurent series approach to specification design and the seminonparametric approach using the Müntz–Szász theorem. His publications on bifurcation analysis and nonlinear dynamics have shown that robustness of dynamical inferences is compromised, when policy simulations are run only at point estimates of parameters, since confidence regions about those estimates are often crossed by bifurcation boundaries.
He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Charter Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics, a Charter Fellow of the Society for Economic Measurement, a Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation, a Fellow of the IC² Institute, and a Fellow of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, and Honorary Professor at Henan University in Kaifeng, China. He is ranked among the top 2% of the world's economists in RePEc.
His book with Nobel Laureate, Paul A. Samuelson, Inside the Economist's Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing (2007), ISBN 1-4051-5917-0, has been translated into seven languages. His MIT Press book, Getting It Wrong: How Faulty Monetary Statistics Undermine the Fed, the Financial System, and the Economy, ISBN 978-0-262-51688-4, won the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (the PROSE Awards) for the best book published in economics during 2012.
During January 2017, he was interviewed in depth about his life's work by Apostolos Serletis. [3] A conference in his honor was held at the Bank of England on May 23–24, 2017.
Special issues of two eminent professional journals, the Journal of Econometrics and Econometric Reviews, have been published in Professor Barnett's honor with contribution by many of the world's most prominent economists. These journals are:
James Tobin was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation and advocated government intervention in particular to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored dependent variables, the well-known tobit model.
Sir Clive William John Granger was a British econometrician known for his contributions to nonlinear time series analysis. He taught in Britain, at the University of Nottingham and in the United States, at the University of California, San Diego. Granger was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2003 in recognition of the contributions that he and his co-winner, Robert F. Engle, had made to the analysis of time series data. This work fundamentally changed the way in which economists analyse financial and macroeconomic data.
Robert Fry Engle III is an American economist and statistician. He won the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing the award with Clive Granger, "for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH)".
John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Christian Gouriéroux is an econometrician who holds a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from the University of Rouen. He has the Professor exceptional level title from France. Gouriéroux is now a professor at University of Toronto and CREST, Paris [Center for Research in Economics and Statistics].
In econometrics and official statistics, and particularly in banking, the Divisia monetary aggregates index is an index of money supply. It uses Divisia index methods.
Christopher Albert Sims is an American econometrician and macroeconomist. He is currently the John J.F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Together with Thomas Sargent, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
Nobuhiro Kiyotaki FBA is a Japanese economist and the Harold H. Helms '20 Professor of Economics and Banking at Princeton University. He is especially known for proposing several models that provide deeper microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics, some of which play a prominent role in New Keynesian macroeconomics.
Albert Marcet Torrens is a Spanish economist, specialized in macroeconomics, time series, financial economics and economic dynamic theory. He is currently serving as Professor of Macroeconomics at the UCL Department of Economics, on leave from his position as ICREA Research Professor and Director of the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE), a research centre of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and AXA Research Chair on Macroeconomic Risk at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society and he has been a Research Fellow of Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) since 1992.
Robert Wayne Clower was an American economist. He is credited with having largely created the field of stock-flow analysis in economics and with seminal works on the micro-foundations of monetary theory and macroeconomics.
John Geanakoplos is an American economist, and the current James Tobin Professor of Economics at Yale University.
Apostolos Serletis is a Greek economist who is a professor of Economics at the University of Calgary.
The Society for Economic Measurement, or SEM, is a scientific learned society in the field of economics. It was founded on August 24, 2013 by William A. Barnett in order to "promote research on economic measurement, using advanced tools from economic theory, econometrics, aggregation theory, experimental economics, mathematics, and statistics". Nobel Laureate James Heckman will take over as the society's second president in 2019 for a three-year term in office. The goal of the SEM is to promote in economics—given the constraints of a social science—the implementation of the strict rules of measurement and data gathering standards used in the physical sciences. Carnegie Mellon University, the Center for Financial Stability, and the University of Kansas are sponsors of the society.
The Barnett critique, named for the work of William A. Barnett in monetary economics, argues that internal inconsistency between the aggregation theory used to produce monetary aggregates and the economic theory used to produce the models within which the aggregates are used are responsible for the appearance of unstable demand and supply for money. The Barnett critique has produced a long and growing literature on monetary aggregation and index number theory and the use of the resulting aggregates in econometric modeling and monetary policy.
Willi Semmler is a German born American economist who currently teaches at The New School in New York.
Xiaohong Chen is a Chinese economist who currently serves as the Malcolm K. Brachman Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a laureate of the China Economics Prize. As one of the leading experts in econometrics, her research focuses on econometric theory, Semi/nonparametric estimation and inference methods, Sieve methods, Nonlinear time series, and Semi/nonparametric models. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Robin C. Sickles is an American economist.
Richard T. Baillie is a British–American economist and statistician who is currently the A J Pasant Professor of Economics at the Michigan State University. He is also part time professor at King's College, London, and Senior Scientific Officer for the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis in Italy, and also on the Executive Council of the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics in Econometrics (SNDE).
Yingyao Hu 胡颖尧 is a Chinese American economist, the Krieger-Eisenhower professor of economics, and currently the Chair of the Department of Economics, Johns Hopkins University.