James Tobin
James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation and advocated government intervention in particular to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored dependent variables, the well-known tobit model.
James Tobin | |
|---|---|
Tobin in 1962 | |
| Born | March 5, 1918 Champaign, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | March 11, 2002 (aged 84) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Academic career | |
| Institution | Yale University Cowles Commission |
| Field | Macroeconomics |
| School or tradition | Neo-Keynesian economics |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Joseph Schumpeter |
| Doctoral students | William Brainard Willem Buiter Duncan K. Foley Koichi Hamada Edmund Phelps Janet Yellen Hiroshi Yoshikawa |
| Contributions | Portfolio theory Keynesian economics Tobin's q Tobit model Tobin Tax Mundell–Tobin effect |
| Awards | John Bates Clark Medal (1955) Nobel Prize in Economics (1981) |
| Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
Along with fellow neo-Keynesian economist James Meade in 1977, Tobin proposed nominal GDP targeting as a monetary policy rule in 1980. Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981 for "creative and extensive work on the analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices."
Outside academia, Tobin was widely known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the "Tobin tax." This was designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.