The UCLA Anderson Forecast will be holding its quarterly presentation next week. It's former director, Prof. Ed Leamer, recently passed away. From an email by Anderson Dean Tony Bernardo:
I’m very sad to pass along the news that Edward Leamer, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Global Economics and Management, and Director Emeritus, UCLA Anderson Forecast, passed away on Tuesday, February 25.
Ed joined our faculty in 1990 as the Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management. His appointment at UCLA Anderson represented a move across the UCLA campus from the Department of Economics, where Ed had been a member of the faculty since 1975. In addition to his professorship, he served as director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast from 2000 until 2016.
Ed’s contributions to the field of economics were profound. Throughout his career, his specific interests broadened, shifted and evolved, making it difficult to summarize his myriad essential contributions to the field.
“There was an important element of storytelling in his methodology and approach,” recalls his friend and close colleague Professor Sebastian Edwards. “There had to be a narrative, supported by a combination of technical and nontechnical tools. But in order for the narrative to be persuasive, very sophisticated statistical techniques were needed and he was one of the strongest statisticians in the profession from a technical point of view. The narratives he built were anchored on solid theory.”
Throughout his career, Ed authored numerous journal articles, books and book chapters. They include his seminal American Economics Review article “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics,” as well as his books Specification Searches: Ad Hoc Inference with Non-Experimental Data and Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories. In the famous paper, Ed advocated for a more critical approach to econometrics, underscoring the need to check how sensitive results are to different data specifications and model assumptions to avoid misleading interpretations, thus encouraging economists to state their assumptions, limitations and potential biases in their analysis to promote greater transparency and accountability.
“One of Ed’s most important contributions was to emphasize that economic data come from non-repeated events, and therefore the methodology of interpretation of statistical analysis of that data must perforce be different than that applied in the natural sciences,” says Professor Jerry Nickelsburg, who worked alongside Ed at the UCLA Anderson Forecast, before succeeding him as director. “That perspective made a significant difference in the application of economics to policy issues.”
As director of the Forecast, Ed influenced business practitioners in every field and, in his December 2000 forecast, he stood virtually alone in predicting the 2001 recession. At Anderson, he taught courses in business and global economics, his most profound impact made in the more than 40 doctoral committees he participated in, including more than 30 he chaired.
As a student, Ed earned his B.A. in mathematics at Princeton University, and his master’s in mathematics (statistics) and Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining UCLA’s Economics faculty, he held a number of positions in academia and elsewhere, including appointments at Harvard University, the Federal Reserve Board, the National Bureau of Economic Research, Central European University and Yale University, among others. In 2016, Ed was the vice-presidential running mate during his friend and fellow economist Laurence Kotlikoff’s run for president of the United States.
It’s impossible to overstate Ed Leamer’s impact on the field of economics and academia. One way to measure his influence, though, is to note that just weeks before he died, nearly 200 of his colleagues, family and friends gathered online to pay him tribute. Those in attendance included no less than three recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, along with dozens of fellow economists, a group that included many of Ed’s former students. Ed once said that the most difficult thing a person can do is engage in deep thought. His brother, the esteemed journalist and author Laurence Leamer, echoed that sentiment in reference to Ed at the end of the tribute. “The greatest adventure is the intellectual adventure,” Laurence said of his brother, “and he has climbed Everest, run the four-minute mile and swum the English Channel.”
Please join me in expressing our most sincere condolences to Ed’s wife, UCLA Anderson alumna Ama Neel (’97), along with his children, grandchildren and family members.
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Before Prof. Leamer died, an online symposium, which he attended, was held in his honor:
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg3XEz9inVE.
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