Irving Fisher

BIOGRAPHY 20. 1Irving pekan(1867 -1947) Irving Fisher was born(p) at Saugerties, New York, the son of a Congregational minister. As did his father, Fisher studied at Yale. Mathematics was his favorite subject. He won number 1 prize in a math contest even as a freshman his doctoral dissertation,Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices(1892), was a landmark in the development of mathematical economics. This dissertation won neighboring(a) praise from no lesser figures than Francis Y.Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto, two renowned economists. Some 55 years later, Ragnar Frisch (eventual winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Economic Science) would say close Fisher He has been anywhere from a decade to two generations before of his snip . it will be hard to find any angiotensin converting enzyme work that has been more influential than Fishers dissertation. It is no wonder that Fisher was a full professor of political economy at Yale within seven-spot years of grad uation. He stayed there during his entire career.Fishers main contributions lie in the theory of utility and consumer choice, the theory of interest and capital, and the theory of statistics (index numbers, distributed lags). These contributions are reflected in such works asThe Nature of Capital and Income(1906),The Theory of by-line(1907),The Purchasing Power of Money(1911) -a great pioneering venture in econometrics andThe fashioning of Index Numbers(1922). In theMaking of Index Numbers, Fisher tried and true many of the formulas introduced in this chapter by the criteria also discussed here.The few formulas that got superlative ratings (such as theEdgeworth indexand Fishers ownideal index) include quantity (or price) weights frombothof the time periods or geographic areas involved in the price (or quantity) comparison that is macrocosm made. However, the inclusion of two sets of weights tends to make the construction of such indexes costly, which is the major causa why the se highly rated indexes are rarely used. (One exception The Bureau of impertinent Commerce of the U. S.Department of Commerce calculates monthly quantity indexes of exports and imports using Fishers formula. ) The works cited to a higher place established Fishers reputation as the countrys greatest scientific economist. As such, he served as president of the American Economic Association and was a crumple and the first president of the Econometric Society. He also played a major role in the establishment of the Cowles Foundation (now at Yale) as a means to nurture mathematical and quantitative research in economics.