Dear NBER Board Members, Researchers, and Staff -
You have probably already heard the sad news of the passing of Robert
Fogel, the inaugural director of the NBER's Program on the Development
of the American Economy (DAE) and an NBER Research Associate for more
than 35 years. Bob died yesterday in Chicago at the age of 86. He was
the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American
Institutions at the Booth School at the University of Chicago.
Bob was a pioneer in the use of econometric tools to study economic
history, and an important contributor to our understanding of long-term
economic growth and of the interplay between economic development and
human well-being. He played a major role in shaping the DAE program at
the NBER, and in leading a number of large NBER-based research projects.
Bob graduated from Cornell in 1948 as a history major with an economics
minor, and later obtained a masters at Columbia (1958) and Ph.D. at
Johns Hopkins (1964) in Economics. He did seminal work on the role of
railroads in economic growth, on the economic issues related to slavery
in the United States (with Stan Engerman), and on the long-term
inter-connections between health and economic status. He was an
inspiring mentor and his insights and direction have had a wide impact
on the direction of research in the fields he studied.
Bob served as president of the American Economic Association (1998) and
he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993. He was a
prolific writer, and his most recent book, /Political Arithmetic: Simon
Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics/, published a few
months ago, chronicled the central role of NBER-based research in the
early 20th century in facilitating the analysis of key questions
involving the rate of economic growth and the distribution of income.
Bob was an extraordinary scholar who made important contributions to the
NBER as well as to many other institutions. He will be deeply missed.
Jim Poterba
Received on Wed Jun 12 2013 - 14:03:28 EDT
