Griliches Dies at 69; Economist Worked On Statistical Analysis

November 11, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Zvi Griliches, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, died Nov. 4 at his home in Cambridge, from pancreatic cancer. He was 69.

Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1930, Griliches and his family were relocated by the Nazis to a Jewish ghetto in 1941 and from there to Dachau in 1944. His parents died in the camps, and after being liberated by George Patton's Third Army in 1945, Griliches headed to Palestine, only to be stopped by the British and sent to an internment camp in Cyprus. He entered Palestine legally in 1947 and served briefly in the Israeli Army as war broke out in 1948. In 1951, despite an almost total lack of formal schooling, he passed the entrance examinations and enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Griliches went on to receive his B.S. and M.S. in agricultural economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1953 and 1954 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1955 and 1957.

He was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago from 1956-59, associate professor from 1959-64, and full professor from 1964-69. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1969, and he was chairman of the Department of Economics from 1980-83. He became a U.S. citizen in 1959.

His major fields of interest were econometrics, productivity and technical change, the economics of education, and agricultural economics. He was a leading expert in the use of statistics to interpret economic data. One of his analyses, for instance, led to a major refinement in the way inflation is calculated. His major publications consisted of nine books, including Economies of Scale and the Form of the Production Function (1971), Handbook of Econometrics (ed., 1986), and Technology, Education and Productivity (1988), and he was the author of dozens of articles and papers. His work was cited an average of 150 times per year by other scholars, according to "The Social Science Citation Index."

Griliches received many awards and honors, including the 1965 John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association and three awards from the American Farm Economic Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to fellowships in the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. He served as president of the American Econometric Society and vice president and president of the American Economic Association. He was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Agricultural Economic Association in 1991, and that same year received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University.

Griliches is survived by his wife, Diane Asseo Griliches, a daughter, Eve, of Charlestown, and a son, Marc, of Brookline.