Tjalling Koopmans

Tjalling C. Koopmans
Born	(1910-08-28)August 28, 1910 's-Graveland, Netherlands
Died	February 26, 1985(1985-02-26) (aged 74) New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Nationality	Netherlands
Fields	Economics
Alma mater	University of Leiden
Doctoral advisor	Hendrik Anthony Kramers Jan Tinbergen
Doctoral students	Leonid Hurwicz
Known for	Exogenous growth model Econometrics Economics of transportation Koopmans' Theorem
Influenced	John Denis Sargan, Alok Bhargava, Trygve Haavelmo
Notable awards	Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1975)

Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was the joint winner, with Leonid Kantorovich, of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Koopmans was born in 's-Graveland, North Holland. He began his university education at the Utrecht University at seventeen, specialising in mathematics. Three years later, in 1930, he switched to theoretical physics. In 1933, he met Jan Tinbergen, the 1969 Bank of Sweden prize winner, and moved to Amsterdam to study mathematical economics under him. In addition to mathematical economics, Koopmans extended his explorations to econometrics and statistics.

Koopmans moved to the United States in 1940. There he worked for a while for a government body in Washington D.C., where he published on the economics of transportation focusing on optimal routing, then moved to Chicago where he joined a research body Cowles Commission for Research in Economics affiliated with the University of Chicago. In 1946, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States and in 1948 director of the Cowles Commission. Rising hostile opposition to the Cowles Commission by the department of economics at University of Chicago during the 1950s led Koopmans to convince the Cowles family to move it to Yale University in 1955 (where it was renamed the Cowles Foundation). He continued to publish, on the economics of optimal growth and activity analysis.

Koopmans' early works on the Hartree–Fock theory are associated with the Koopmans' theorem, which is very well known in quantum chemistry. Koopmans was awarded his Nobel prize (jointly with Leonid Kantorovich) for his contributions to the field of resource allocation, specifically the theory of optimal use of resources. The work for which the prize was awarded focused on activity analysis, the study of interactions between the inputs and outputs of production, and their relationship to economic efficiency and prices. Finally, the importance of the article by Koopmans (1942) deriving the distribution of the serial correlation coefficient was recognized by John von Neumann, and it later influenced the optimal tests for a unit root by John Denis Sargan and Alok Bhargava (Sargan and Bhargava, 1983).

Further reading

• Hughes Hallett, Andrew J. "Econometrics and the Theory of Economic Policy: The Tinbergen-Theil Contributions 40 Years On," Oxford Economic Papers (1989) 41#1 pp 189-214
• Koopmans, Tjalling (1942). Serial correlation and quadratic forms in normal variables. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 13, 14-33.
• Koopmans, Tjalling and Montias, J. M. (1971). On the Description and Comparison of Economic Systems. Cowles Foundation Paper No. 357 (1971).
• Koopmans, Tjalling C., "Concepts of optimality and their uses", Nobel Memorial Lecture, December 11, 1975
• Sargan, J.D. and Alok Bhargava (1983). "Testing residuals from least squares regressions for being generated by the Gaussian random walk", Econometrica, 51,153-174.

External links

• Nobel autobiography
• Scarf, Herbert E., "Tjalling Charles Koopmans: August 28, 1910 — February 26, 1985", National Academy of Science
• IDEAS/RePEc