16 Facts About David Cass

David Cass was a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, mostly known for his contributions to general equilibrium theory.

In 1974 David Cass left for the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of economics until his death.

David Cass died in 2008 in Philadelphia after a long illness.

David Cass was divorced and the father of two children.

David Cass was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1970, was an elected fellow of the Econometric Society since 1972, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Geneva in 1994, was a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association in 1999 and was an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2003.

David Cass made important contributions to pure economic theory, mostly in the field of general equilibrium theory.

David Cass made major contributions to the theory of optimal growth, the theory of sunspots and the theory of incomplete markets.

David Cass was famous for the "Cass criterion" for overlapping generations models and in the neoclassical growth model, and his work, together with Karl Shell, on the influence of extrinsic uncertainty on economic equilibria, known as the concept of sunspot equilibria or the theory of sunspots.

David Cass was a major contributor to the theory of incomplete markets, the turnpike theory and theory of economies with markets that repeatedly open over time.

Accordingly, David Cass is rightly honored, together with Tjalling Koopmans and Frank Ramsey, as one of the fathers of dynamic macroeconomic analysis.

David Cass's paper was the first to endogenize the consumption-savings decision by deriving an optimal capital accumulation trajectory that maximized the discounted sum of utility payoffs over time.

The tools that David Cass used to derive his results were from the then-newly developed field of optimal control in mathematics pioneered by Lev Pontryagin.

David Cass was promoted to untenured associate professor at Cowles and remained at Yale until 1970.

David Cass coauthored several more papers during this time with Joseph Stiglitz and Menahem Yaari, who were at Yale during this period.

The paper on present values as efficiency prices that David Cass co-authored with Yaari is easily seen to be a precursor of his subsequent work at Carnegie Mellon on capital overaccumulation and efficiency which led to the famous David Cass criterion for determining inefficiency.

In 1994, David Cass was instrumental in establishing the Beth Hayes Prize for Graduate Research Accomplishment at the University of Pennsylvania.