Edwin Mansfield

Edwin Mansfield ( born 1930 in Kingston, New York, USA, † November 17, 1997 in Wallingford, Pennsylvania ) was an economist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Life

Mansfield was born in 1930 in Kingston, New York ( USA), but grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey. At Dartmouth College, where he earned a bachelor's degree, the Royal Statistical Society awarded him the diploma and finally at Duke University, he earned a doctoral degree.

After a brief teaching at the universities Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University and Harvard University, he was in 1964 appointed professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught until shortly before his death, and since 1985 also the post of Head of the Centre for Economics and Business and Technology held.

In addition, Mansfield also worked as advisor to several institutions, including the World Bank, ExxonMobil and GlaxoSmithKline, usually with the aim of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of research and development. He also served on the board of directors of the American Productivity and Quality Center and Chairman of the Visiting Committee at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Mansfield died on 17 November 1997 at the age of 67 years at his home in Wallingford, Pennsylvania from cancer.

He was married to Lucile Howe Mansfield ( b. 1955? ) And had two children, Edward and Elizabeth.

Work

Mansfield dealt primarily with the diffusion of innovations. He came to the conclusion that public investment in private sector R & D projects to the public ( the economy ) help far more than the companies involved respectively. According to his research, the greatest economic success of R & D in the postwar period but has not scored in the high-tech sector but in the textile industry.

He also tried to examine Schumpeter's hypothesis that larger firms are more likely to innovate are capable, but was no statistically significant result.

Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Mansfield called a " dominant figure for our present view of the innovation economy" and certified him to create a " very solid theoretical and empirical basis for work ".

Other research fields for which Mansfield made ​​important contributions, the price theory, determining the influence of academic research on technological change and the empirical study of patenting behavior in the industry. The latter consolidated the use of patent statistics in innovation research.

Since the early 1970s he also worked as an author of textbooks on the topics of microeconomics, economics for management decisions and Econometrics, which reached more than one million copies sold, come on over 1,000 U.S. universities for use and have been translated into several languages.

Monographs:

• (1968 ) Mansfield: Industrial Research and Technological Innovation: An Econometric Analysis
• (1968 ) Mansfield: The Economics of Technological Change
• (1971 ) Mansfield, Rapoport, Snow et al.: New Research and Innovation in the Modern Corporation
• (1971 ) Mansfield: Technological Change: An Introduction to a Vital Area of Modern Economics
• (1977 ) Mansfield, Rapoport, Romeo et al.: The Production and Application of New Industrial Technology
• (1982 ) Mansfield, Romeo et al.: Technology Transfer, Productivity and Economic Policy
• (1995 ) Mansfield: Innovation, Technology and the Economy

Mansfield was also active as an author and participants for the TV series Economics U $ A, in the problems of micro and macro economics to a wide audience has had access. At Lehigh University he also led one of the first television courses for technology management.

Awards

Mansfield in 1979 was the first American economist who was invited as a speaker in the People's Republic of China.

Mansfield was awarded for his research on the economics of technological change many awards such as the 1982 Publication Award of the Patent Law Association, the 1992 Honor Award from the National Technological University, 1994 Special Creativity Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, 1996 Kenan Enterprise Award and the Prentice Hall Award. In addition, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He also received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Fulbright Program.

From 1971 to 1985 Mansfield was one of the 20 most cited economists in the USA.