BARNETT , William Arnold

Born: 1941, Boston, Massachusetts

Marital Status: Married .

Current Post: Oswald Distinguished Professor of Macroeconomics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2002-.

Past Posts: Rocket Engine System Development Engineer on F-1 rocket engine (Apollo Saturn V booster engine), Rocketdyne Division of Boeing Company, Los Angeles, California, 1963-1969; Research Economist, Special Studies Section, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D. C., 1973-1981; Stuart Professor of Economics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 1982-1990; Professor of Economics, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, 1990 – 2003; Oswald Distinguished Professor of Macroeconomics, 2002 – present.

Degrees: BS in mechanical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , 1963; MBA in finance and economics, University of California at Berkeley, 1965; MA in economics, Carnegie Mellon University, 1973; Ph.D. in statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, 1974.

Offices and Honors: Research Associate, Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1977-1980; Senior Fellow, the IC2 Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 1983-; Program Chair Elect, Business and Economic Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association, 1992, and Program Chair, 1993; Charter Fellow, Fellows of the Journal of Econometrics; 1988-; Fellow, American Statistical Association, since 1989; Omicron Delta Epsilon and Sigma Xi honor societies; Listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World; Contract Selection Panel Member in Economics, National Institute of Health, 1983; research grants from the National Science Foundation, Hogg Foundation, the IC2 Institute, and the RGK Foundation; Member of Scientific Organizing Committee, Discoveries 1985 Symposium: Laws of Nature and Human Conduct, Specificities and Unifying Themes, the Solvay Institute, Brussels, Belgium, 1985.  Fellow, World Innovation Foundation (which includes 86 Nobel Laureates, of which 8 are in Economics), since 2005.  Member of Advisory Council, Society for Computational Economics, since 2005.

Co-organizer and Program Chair of the following conferences: New Approaches to Modeling, Specification Selection, and Econometric Inference (with Ronald Gallant) , University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 1984; Conference on New Approaches to Monetary Economics (with Kenneth Singleton), University of Texas, Austin, Texas 1985; Conference on Dynamic Econometric Modeling (with Ernst Berndt and Halbert White) , University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 1986; Conference on Economic Complexity: Chaos, Sunspots, Bubbles, and Nonlinearity (with John Geweke and Karl Shell) , University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 1987; Conference on Nonparametric and Semiparametric Methods in Econometrics and Statistics (with James Powell and George Tauchen), Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 1988; Conference on Economic Equilibrium Theory and Applications (with Andreu Mas-Colell, Jacques Dreze, Claude D’Aspremont, and Bernard Cornet) , C.O.R.E., Louvain la Neuve, Belgium, 1989; Conference on Political Economy: Institutions, Information, Competition, and Representation (with Melvin Hinich, Douglas North, Howard Rosenthal, and Norman Schofield) , Washington University in St. Louis, 1991; Conference on Social Choice, Welfare and Ethics (with Maurice Salles, Herve Moulin, and Norman Schofield), University of Caen, France, 1992; Conference on Nonlinear Dynamics (with Alan Kirman and Mark Salmon), European University Institute, Florence, Italy, 1992; Conference on Disequilibrium Dynamics (with Giancarlo Gandolfo and Claude Hillinger), University of Munich, Munich, Germany, 1993; Conference on Computation and Estimation in Economics and Finance (with Lars Hansen, Andrew Lo, and George Tauchen), Washington University in St. Louis, 1995.

Editorial Duties: Editor of September 1980 and January 1981 special editions of the Journal of Econometrics; Associate Editor, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 1983-; Series Editor, North Holland Elsevier-Science monograph series, International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics, 1987-, and volume coeditor of 13 of the volumes in the series; Editor, Cambridge University Press journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics , 1997-.

Principal Fields of Interest: C1 Econometric and Statistical Models: General; E4 Money and Interest Rates; E1 General Aggregative Models.

Principal Publications: Principal Books (maximum of 10):  These 10 books (maximum permitted) were selected from the total of 26 published books.  1. Consumer Demand and Labor Supply: Goods, Monetary Assets, and Time , North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1981; 2. New Approaches to Monetary Economics (with Kenneth Singleton), Cambridge University Press, 1987; 3. Dynamic Econometric Modeling (with Ernst Berndt and Halbert White) , Cambridge University Press, 1988; 4. Economic Complexity: Chaos, Sunspots, Bubbles, and Nonlinearity (with John Geweke and Karl Shell) , Cambridge University Press, 1989; 5. New Approaches to Modeling, Specification Selection, and Econometric Inference (with Ronald Gallant), Cambridge University Press, 1989; 6. Nonparametric and Semiparametric Methods in Econometrics and Statistics (with James Powell and George Tauchen), Cambridge University Press, 1991; 7. Economic Equilibrium Theory and Applications (with Claude D’ABARNETTspremont, Jean Gabszewicz, Bernard Cornet, and Andreu Mas-Colell), Cambridge University Press, 1991; 8. Political Economy: Institutions, Information, Competition, and Representation (with Melvin Hinich, and Norman Schofield) , Cambridge University Press, 1993; 9. The Theory of Monetary Aggregation: the Contributions of William A. Barnett (coedited with Apostolos Serletis), North-Holland, Contributions to Economic Analysis, 2000; 10.  Functional Structure and Approximation in Econometrics:  the Contributions of William A. Barnett (coedited with Jane Binner).

Principal Articles (maximum of 10):  These 10 articles (maximum permitted) were selected from my total of over 130 published articles.  1. “Maximum Likelihood and Iterated Aitken Estimation of Non-Linear Systems of Equations,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, June 1976; 2. “Recursive Subaggregation and a Generalized Hypocycloidal Demand Model,” Econometrica, July 1977; 3. “Theoretical Foundations for the Rotterdam Model,” Review of Economic Studies, January 1979; 4. “The Joint Allocation of Leisure and Goods Expenditure,” Econometrica, May 1979; 5. “Economic Monetary Aggregates: An Application of Index Number and Aggregation Theory,” Journal of Econometrics , September 1980; 6. “The New Divisia Monetary Aggregates,” (with Paul Spindt and Edward Offenbacher), Journal of Political Economy, December 1984; 7. “The Global Properties of the Minflex Laurent, Generalized Leontief, and Translog Flexible Functional Forms,” (with Yul Lee), Econometrica, November 1985; 8. “Seminonparametric Bayesian Estimation of the Asymptotically Ideal Production Model,” (with John Geweke and Michael Wolfe), Journal of Econometrics, July/Aug 1991; 9. “Consumer Theory and the Demand for Money,” (with Douglas Fisher and Apostolos Serletis), Journal of Economic Literature, 1992. 10. “A Single-Blind Controlled Competition among Tests for Nonlinearity and Chaos,” (with A. R. Gallant, M. J. Hinich. J. A. Jungeilges, D. T. Kaplan, and M. J. Jensen), Journal of Econometrics, vol. 82, 1997.

Principal Contributions:

In early work, I proved consistency, asymptotic normality, and asymptotic efficiency of the joint maximum likelihood estimator for systems of nonlinear seemingly unrelated regression equations. These proofs opened the way to the use of microeconomic theory in systemwide modeling , when the theory produces nonlinear systems of equations. I originated many such joint modeling methods in subsequent publications, including my Laurent series approach and my Muntz-Szatz series seminonparametric approach, which generates the Asymptotically Ideal Model (AIM). That model uses the natural basis for spanning the neoclassical function space. I also proved the theorems that support the Rotterdam model under weak assumptions, after aggregation over consumers.

The official monetary aggregates published by most central banks violate principles of index number theory and aggregation theory, since those aggregates add together imperfect substitutes. But the user cost formula for monetary services was needed to permit application of index number theory to monetary aggregation. I derived that user cost formula and introduced the Divisia and Fisher ideal indexes as methods of computing monetary quantity aggregates. My Divisia monetary aggregates have become widely known and are in use within many of the world’s central banks, including the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. In the United States, my Divisia monetary aggregates (called the Monetary Services Indexes) are maintained and made available to the public by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. More recently my students and I have produced the Divisia monetary aggregates with risk-adjusted user cost prices and thereby have extended the literature on index number theory to the case of risk in a manner that unifies economic index number theory with finance CAPM theory.

Barnett In joint research with physicists and statisticians, I have investigated tests of nonlinearity and chaos, and with one of those coauthors, I have published the first successful finding of chaos with economic data (my Divisia monetary aggregates). As a result of controversies regarding the available tests, I designed and ran a successful single-blind competition among the competing tests of nonlinearity and chaos.

Taken from Foreword by Peter G. Klein: “There never lived at the same time,” wrote Ludwig von Mises, “more than a score of men whose work contributed anything essential to economics.” One of those men was Carl Menger (1840–1921), professor of political economy at the University of Vienna and founder of the Austrian School of economics. Menger’s pathbreaking Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Principles of economics), published in 1871, not only introduced the concept of marginal analysis, it presented a radically new approach to economic analysis, an approach that still forms the core of the Austrian theory of value and price. Unlike his contemporaries William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras, who independently developed their own concepts of marginal utility during the 1870s, Menger favored an approach that was deductive, teleological, and, in a primary sense, humanistic. While Menger shared his contemporaries’ preference for abstract reasoning, he was primarily interested in explaining the realworld actions of real people, not in creating artificial, stylized representations of reality. Economics, for Menger, is the study of purposeful human choice, the relationship between means and ends. “All things are subject to the law of cause and effect,” he begins his treatise. “This great principle knows no exception.” 2 Jevons and Walras rejected cause and effect in favor of simultaneous determination, the technique of modeling complex relations as systems of simultaneous equations in which no variable “causes” another. Theirs has become the standard approach in contemporary economics, accepted by nearly all economists but the followers of Carl Menger.