爱德华·普雷斯科特

生平

2014年8月，普雷斯科特被任命为澳洲国立大学的兼职杰出经济教授。普雷斯科特于2022年11月6日逝世，享年81岁。

获奖和荣誉

亚历山大·亨德森奖（1967年）

经济计量学会会士（1980年）

美国文理科学院院士（1992年）

欧文·普莱因·内默斯经济学奖（2002年）

诺贝尔经济学奖（2004年）

美国国家科学院院士（2008年）

Edward Christian Prescott (December 26, 1940 – November 6, 2022) was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. Prescott died of cancer on November 6, 2022, at the age of 81.

Biography

Early life

Prescott was born in Glens Falls, New York, to Mathilde Helwig Prescott and William Clyde Prescott. In 1962, he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Swarthmore College, where he was a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He then received a master's degree from Case Western Reserve University in operations research in 1963, and a PhD in economics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1967.

Career

From 1966 to 1971, Prescott taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He then returned to Carnegie Mellon until 1980, when he moved to the University of Minnesota, where he taught until 2003. In 1978, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, where he was named a Ford Foundation Research Professor. In the following year, he visited Northwestern University and stayed there until 1982. From 2003 on he taught at Arizona State University.

Prescott was an economic advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since 1981. In 2004, he held the Maxwell and Mary Pellish Chair in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2006, he held the Shinsei Bank Visiting Professorship at New York University. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed an Adjunct Distinguished Professor at Research School of Economics (RSE) of the Australian National University.

The Research Papers in Economics project ranked him as the 19th most influential economist in the world as of August 2012 based on his academic contributions. More recently working as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and as a professor at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, he was a major figure in macroeconomics, especially the theories of business cycles and general equilibrium. In his "Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans," published in 1977 with Finn E. Kydland, he analyzed whether central banks should have strict numerical targets or be allowed to use their discretion in setting monetary policy. He is also well known for his work on the Hodrick–Prescott filter, used to smooth fluctuations in a time series.

Nobel Prize

Prescott and Finn Kydland received the Nobel prize for economics based on two papers they authored. In the first paper, written in 1977 "Rules Rather than Discretion: The inconsistency of optimal planning" Prescott and Kydland argue that purpose and goals of economic planning and policy is to trigger a desired response from the economy. However, Prescott and Kydland realized that these sectors are made up of individuals, individuals who make assumptions and predictions about the future. As Prescott and Kydland stated "Even if there is a fixed and agreed upon social objective function and policy makers know the timing and magnitude of the effects of their actions...……

Honours and awards

United States National Academy of Sciences (2008)

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2004)

Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, Northwestern University (2002)

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992)

Fellow, Econometric Society (1980)

Alexander Henderson Award, Carnegie Mellon (1967)