27 Facts About Ragnar Frisch

Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch was an influential Norwegian economist known for being one of the major contributors to establishing economics as a quantitative and statistically informed science in the early 20th century.

Ragnar Frisch coined the term econometrics in 1926 for utilising statistical methods to describe economic systems, as well as the terms microeconomics and macroeconomics in 1933, for describing individual and aggregate economic systems, respectively.

Ragnar Frisch was the first to develop a statistically informed model of business cycles in 1933.

Ragnar Frisch remained at the University of Oslo until his retirement in 1965.

Ragnar Frisch was one of the founders of the Econometric Society in 1930, and edited the journal Econometrica for its first 21 years.

Ragnar Frisch has given name to the Frisch Medal, which is awarded every year by the Econometric Society for the best paper in econometrics published in the last five years, as well as the Frisch-centre for Applied Economic Analysis at the University of Oslo.

Ragnar Frisch was born on 3 March 1895 in Christiania as the son of gold- and silversmith Anton Frisch and Ragna Fredrikke Frisch.

The Frisch family had emigrated from Germany to Kongsberg in Norway in the 17th century and his ancestors had worked for the Kongsberg Silver Mines for generations; Ragnar's grandfather Antonius Frisch had become a goldsmith in Christiania in 1856.

Ragnar Frisch's family had thus worked with precious metals like silver and gold for at least 300 years.

However at his mother's advice, while doing his apprenticeship Ragnar Frisch started studying at the Royal Frederick University.

Ragnar Frisch's chosen topic was economics, as it seemed to be "the shortest and easiest study" available at the university, and passed his degree in 1919.

In 1921 Ragnar Frisch received a fellowship from the university which enabled him to spend three years studying economics and mathematics in France and England.

Ragnar Frisch published a few papers about probability theory, started teaching at the University of Oslo during 1925 and, in 1926, he obtained the Dr Philos.

Also in 1926, Ragnar Frisch published an article outlining his view that economics should follow the same path towards theoretical and empirical quantization that other sciences, especially physics, had followed.

Ragnar Frisch started lecturing a course on production theory, introducing a mathematization of the subject.

Ragnar Frisch received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to visit the United States in 1927.

Ragnar Frisch wrote a paper analyzing the role of investment in explaining economic fluctuations.

Ragnar Frisch spent one year to modernize and recapitalize his family's workshop by selling family assets and to find a jeweller to manage the business for him.

Ragnar Frisch became a full Professor at the university in 1931.

Ragnar Frisch founded at the university the Rockefeller-funded Institute of Economics in 1932 and became its Director of Research.

Ragnar Frisch received the Antonio Feltrinelli prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1961 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969 for "having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes".

Ragnar Frisch was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Ragnar Frisch was one of the founders of economics as a modern science.

Ragnar Frisch made a number of significant advances in the field of economics and coined a number of new words including econometrics and macroeconomics.

Ragnar Frisch is credited with introducing the term "model" in its modern economic sense by Paul Samuelson, based on a 1930 Yale University lecture.

Ragnar Frisch helped introduce econometric modeling to government economic planning and accounting.

Ragnar Frisch was one of the founders of the Econometric Society and editor of Econometrica for over twenty years.