Tinbergen, Jan

Dutch economist. Tinbergen's work was focused on econometrics (the mathematical-statistical expression of economic theory), with studies of the US and British economies appearing in Statistical Testing of Business Cycle Theories (1939) and Business Cycles in the United Kingdom, 1870–1914 (1951) respectively. He shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1969 with Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch.

Tinbergen threw himself into econometric research and soon found himself building econometric models of the entire economy. His first attempt to build such a model, containing 24 equations to describe the Dutch economy, was not published until 1936, ten years after it was first conceived. Next was a two-volume work, Statistical Testing of Business Cycle Theories (1939), the first of which focused entirely on investment activity and the second on the macroeconomic modelling of business cycles in the USA. English economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a scathing review of the first volume in The Economic Journal, which drew a polite reply from Tinbergen complaining that Keynes had totally misunderstood his econometric methods. Even the more down-to-earth second volume was greeted with general scepticism. Model-building of this type had to wait until the 1950s before it was to become truly respectable. Tinbergen, however, was not discouraged from his aims and went on to duplicate his earlier US model for the UK economy in Business Cycles in the United Kingdom, 1870–1914 (1951).