Zvi Griliches

Hirsh Zvi Griliches ( born September 12, 1930 in Kaunas, Lithuania, † November 4, 1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts ) was an economist at Harvard University.

Life

Griliches was born in Kaunas ( Lithuania) in a Jewish, Russian-speaking family. His father Efim Ilyich Griliches (1896-1945) was a laborer in a tobacco factory, his mother was Clara Ziv Griliches (? -1945 ). Griliches had a younger sister Ellen Griliches ( 1933 to 1996 ).

During the Second World War, he and his family were deported to the concentration camp at Dachau. On May 2, 1945, the camp was liberated by American troops, whereupon Griliches spent in the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth organization in Munich two years. In 1947, he tried to illegally enter a ship to Palestine, where he was arrested by the British and taken to a camp in Cyprus. In the seven months of captivity, he established relationships with academics and learned the English language. After his release he came to Palestine, where he joined the armed forces of Israel (which did not exist as a state ) and worked on a kibbutz for a short time. He learned the Hebrew language, and finally was able to thanks to a passed matriculation exam at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem enroll for the study of history.

Griliches sister and uncle emigrated to America after the war, so he applied for a degree in Agricultural Economics at the University of Berkeley, which he took up in 1951 with a scholarship. After two years, he received his Bachelor after another year of the Master in Economics and Econometrics. During this time he also met his wife Diane Asseo Griliches, with whom he had a total of two children: Eve Griliches (born 1957 ) and Marc Griliches (b. 1960).

In 1954 he went to the University of Chicago, where he in 1956 as an assistant professor of Economics and 1957 received a doctorate obtained. Griliches 1959 received U.S. citizenship.

Zvi Griliches died on 4 November 1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts ( USA) at the age of 69 years to pancreatic cancer.

Work

The work Griliches ' ​​concerned mostly the economics of technological change, where he focused on empirical studies on innovation diffusion and the role of R & D, patents, and education.

In his dissertation of 1957, Hybrid Corn: An Exploration in the Economics of Technological Change ( Hybrid Corn: An examination of the economy, technological change ), he demonstrated that follows the seed - corn in the penetration of the Logistic curve. Later, Edwin Mansfield and other researchers have found that this (ie, the technological progress ) is a general principle in the diffusion of innovations. Griliches was one of the first scientists who treated the technology development as an economic phenomenon (as opposed to an exogenous factor ).

Most innovations either make the production process more efficient and improve the quality of goods produced. Through the analysis of the measurement of the impact of innovation on the economy Griliches came to his basic studies on economic growth, productivity, production functions, measurements of economic inputs and outputs, Hedonic pricing and their mapping in price indices.

In addition, Griliches published important work on econometrics, including the delay effect in the time series analysis and aggregation of microeconomic raw data. His particular interest was the measurement of hidden variables in the production functions.

Griliches 1975 was president of the American Econometric Society in 1993 and president of the American Economic Association. From 1969 to 1977 was one of the editors of the journal Econometrica. Twice (1961 Stigler Commision, 1996 Boskin Commission), he worked on committees of the U.S. Senate with the evaluation of the measurement of inflation.

Awards

Zvi Griliches 1965 won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal. In the same year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1975 to the National Academy of Sciences. He also received the honorary title of Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association.

In his memory, the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center was established at the Samuel Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology in Israel. In Russia and some other countries of the former Soviet Union, it is awarded in honor of Zvi Griliches Excellence Award.

Swell

• Arthur M. Diamond, Jr.: Zvi Griliches 's Contributions to the Economics of Technology and Growth. In: Economics of Innovation and New Technology. 13, no 4 ( June 2004), pp. 365-297. (PDF file, 267 kB)
• Obituary on the website of the University of California (English)
• Zvi Griliches on Diffusion, Lags and Productivity Growth ... Connecting the Dots by Paul A. David ( English ) (PDF file)