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Lawrence Robert Klein (born September 14, 1920) is
an United States|American economics|economist.

Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and is of
Jewish descent. For his work in creating computer
models to forecast economic trends in the field of
econometrics at the University of Pennsylvania, he
was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic
Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1980.
Specifically "for the creation of economic models
and their application to the analysis of economic
fluctuations and economic policies." Thanks to his
work such models became widespread among
Economist|economists.

==Development of business Forecasting model==

Professor Klein is a graduate of Los Angeles City
College, where he learned calculus; the University
of California, Berkeley, where he began his
computer modeling; he earned his PhD at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
1944.

Klein then moved to the Cowles Commission for
Research in Economics, which was then at the
University of Chicago, now the
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/ Cowles Foundation. 
There he built a model of the United States
economy to forecast the development of business
fluctuations and to study the effects of
government economic-political policy. After World
War II Klein used his model to correctly predict,
against the prevailing expectation, that there
would be an economic upturn rather than a
Recession|depression.  Similarly, he correctly
predicted a mild recession at the end of the
Korean War.

In 1959 Klein was awarded the John Bates Clark
Medal, one of the two most prestigious awards in
the field of economics.

At the University of Michigan, Klein developed
enhanced Model (macroeconomics)|macroeconomic
models, in particular the famous Klein-Goldberger
model with Arthur Goldberger, which was based on
foundations laid by Professor Jan Tinbergen of the
Netherlands, later winner of the first economics
prize in 1969.  Klein differed from Tinbergen by
using an alternative economic theory and a
different statistical technique.

==McCarthyism and move to England==

Klein moved to England in 1954.  This was prompted
by Senator Joseph McCarthy's
anti-Communism|communist "Witchhunt|witch-hunt",
and the denial of his continuing tenure at
Michigan.  Klein had been a member of the American
Communist Party in 1946 and 1944 while in Chicago;
he later said that this was the result of youthful
naïveté.

In England, Klein developed a model of the United
Kingdom economy at the University of Oxford,
before returning to the US in 1958 to join the
Department of Economics at the University of
Pennsylvania.  He became "Benjamin Franklin
Professor of Economics and Finance" at their
Wharton Business School in 1968.

==Return to America at Wharton==

In the early 1960s Klein became the leader of the
major "Brookings-SSRC Project", to construct a
detailed econometric model to forecast the
short-term development of the American economy.

Later in the 60's, Klein constructed the "Wharton
Econometric Forecasting Model". This model,
considerably smaller than the Brookings model,
achieved a very good reputation for its analysis
of business conditions, used to forecast
fluctuations including national product, exports,
investments, and consumption, and to study the
effect on them of changes in taxation, public
expenditure, oil price, etc.

Professor Klein founded Wharton Econometric
Forecasting Associates or WEFA, (now Global
Insight).  At the end of the 1960s he was the
initiator of, and an active research leader in,
their LINK project, which was also mentioned in
his Nobel citation.  The aim of this was to
produce the world's first global economic model,
linking models of many of the world's countries so
that the effect of changes in the economy of one
country are reflected in other countries.

==Later Career==

In 1976 Klein was coordinator of Jimmy Carter's
economic task force before the US presidential
election.  He declined an invitation to join
Carter's administration.  Klein has also been
president of the Econometric Society and the
American Economic Association (in 1977).

His Nobel citation concludes that "few, if any,
research workers in the empirical field of
economic science, have had so many successors and
such a large impact as Lawrence Klein".

==Publications==

Klein's publications include:

*An essay on the theory of economic prediction
(With Jaime Marquez, ????) ISBN 0841020051
*Economic Fluctuations in the United States,
1921-41 (1950)
*An Econometric Model of the United States,
1929-52 (with AS Goldberger, 1955)
*The Keynesian Revolution (1946) ISBN 0333081315
*The Wharton Econometric Forecasting Model (with
MK Evans, 1967)
*A Textbook of Econometrics (1973) ISBN 0139128328
*The Brookings Model (With Gary Fromm. 1975)
*Econometric Model Performance (1976)
*An Introduction to Econometric Forecasting and
Forecasting Models (1980) ISBN 0669028967
*Econometric Models As Guides for Decision Making
(1982) ISBN 0029174309
*The Economics of Supply and Demand 1983
*Economics, Econometrics and The LINK (with M
Dutta, 1995) ISBN 0444817875


==See also==
*List of economists
*List of economics consultancies and think tanks

==External link==
*
http://www.nobel-winners.com/Economics/lawrence_ro
bert_klein.html Lawrence Klein