Ragnar Frisch

Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch (3 March 1895 – 31 January 1973) was a Norwegian economist and econometrician who helped turn economics into a quantitative, statistics-based science in the early 1900s. He invented the word "econometrics" in 1926 to describe using statistical methods on economic systems, and in 1933 he came up with the terms "microeconomics" and "macroeconomics" for studying individual and whole-economy systems. That same year, he created the first statistical model of business cycles. His later work on that model, alongside Jan Tinbergen, earned them the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969.

Frisch earned his doctorate in mathematics and statistics from the University of Oslo in 1926. Afterward, he spent five years researching in the United States at the University of Minnesota and Yale University. He taught briefly at Yale from 1930 to 1931, then turned down a full professorship there after colleagues urged him to return to the University of Oslo. Back in Oslo, he was appointed by the King-in-Council as Professor of Economics and Statistics at the Faculty of Law in 1931, and the next year he became head of the newly founded Institute of Economics at the university. He stayed at Oslo until his retirement in 1965.

Frisch helped start the Econometric Society in 1930 and edited its journal, *Econometrica*, for its first 21 years. The society now awards the Frisch Medal each year for the best econometrics paper published in the previous five years. The Frisch Centre for Applied Economic Analysis at the University of Oslo is named after him, as is the Grand Auditorium at the university's Institute of Economics.

Born in Christiania on 3 March 1895, Frisch was the son of gold- and silversmith Anton Frisch and Ragna Fredrikke Frisch (née Kittilsen). His family had emigrated from Germany to Kongsberg, Norway, in the 1600s, and his ancestors worked for the Kongsberg Silver Mines for generations; his grandfather Antonius Frisch became a goldsmith in Christiania in 1856. The family had dealt in precious metals for at least 300 years.

Expected to take over the family business, Frisch apprenticed at the David Andersen workshop in Oslo. On his mother's advice, he also studied at the Royal Frederick University, choosing economics because it seemed "the shortest and easiest study." He earned his degree in 1919. In 1920, he passed his handicraftsman tests and became a partner in his father's workshop.

In 1921, a university fellowship let Frisch spend three years studying economics and mathematics in France and England. After returning to Norway in 1923, despite the family business struggling, he pursued research, deciding his true calling was science, not jewellery. He published papers on probability theory, began teaching at the University of Oslo in 1925, and earned his doctorate in mathematical statistics in 1926.

That same year, Frisch published an article arguing that economics should follow physics toward theoretical and empirical quantification. He also released his key paper "Sur un problème d'économie pure," which laid out theoretical axioms for ordinal and cardinal utility and then empirically estimated the cardinal version. He began lecturing on production theory, introducing mathematical approaches.

A Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1927 took Frisch to the United States, where he connected with economists interested in mathematical and statistical methods, including Irving Fisher, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Allyn Young, and Henry Schultz. He wrote a paper on how investment drives economic fluctuations; Mitchell, who had just published a book on business cycles, helped popularize Frisch's advanced methods.

Though his fellowship was extended to Italy and France, Frisch returned to Norway the next year after his father's death. He spent a year modernizing and recapitalizing the family workshop by selling assets and finding a jeweller to manage it. He then resumed academic work, becoming an associate professor of statistics and economics at Oslo University in 1928. In 1927 and 1928, he published articles on time-series statistics. In 1929, he released his first major essay on econometric methodology, "Correlation and scatter in statistical variables," and later that year "Statics and dynamics in economic theory," which brought dynamics into economic analysis. He became a full professor in 1931 and founded the Rockefeller-funded Institute of Economics at the university in 1932, serving as its research director. Frisch received the Antonio Feltrinelli prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1961 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.