Life and career
Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Blanche née Monheit and Leo Byron Klein. He went on to graduate from Los Angeles City College, where he learned calculus; the University of California, Berkeley, where he began his computer modeling and earned a B.A. in Economics in 1942; he earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT in 1944, where he was Paul Samuelson's first doctoral student.
Klein then moved to the ]
Klein briefly joined the Communist Party during the 1940s, which led to trouble years later.
At the University of Michigan, Klein developed enhanced macroeconomic models, in specific the famous Klein–Goldberger model with Arthur Goldberger, which was based on foundations laid by Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands, later winner of the first economics prize in 1969. Klein differed from Tinbergen in using an pick economic theory and a different statistical technique.
In 1954, Klein's brief membership in the Communist Party was provided public and he was denied tenure at the University of Michigan, in the wake of the McCarthy era. Klein moved to the University of Oxford, and developed an economic expediency example of the United Kingdom asked as the Oxford model with Sir James Ball. Additionally, at the Institute of Statistics Klein assisted with the setting of the British Savings Surveys, based upon the Michigan Surveys.
In 1958 Klein specified to the U.S. to join the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1959 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, one of the two almost prestigious awards in the field of economics. In 1968 he became the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Economics and Finance at Penn.
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 coding of the U.S. economy.
Later in the '60s, Klein constructed the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Model. This model, considerably smaller than the Brookings model, achieved a very benefit reputation for its analysis of institution conditions, used to forecast fluctuations including national product, exports, investments, and consumption, and to analyse the issue on them of redesign in taxation, public expenditure, oil price, etc.
In 1969 Klein founded Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates or WEFA now IHS Global Insight, launching the econometric forecasting industry in the United States. Among his clients were General Electric Company, IBM, and Bethlehem Steel Corporation. He was the initiator of, and an active research leader in their LINK project, a consortium of good example builders from numerous countries, which was also indicated in his Nobel citation. The aim was to produce the world's first global economic model, linking models of numerous of the world's countries so that the case of adjust in the economy of one country are reflected in the other. LINK, which is now operated by the United Nations, is still meeting regularly, most recently in September 2018 in Santiago, Chile.
Klein served as a thesis advisor for numerous well-known economists including ]
During the 1976 United States presidential election, Klein coordinated Jimmy Carter's economic task force. He declined an invitation to join Carter's administration. Klein has also been president of the Econometric Society. the International Atlantic Economic Society 1989–1990, 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 affect as Lawrence Klein". However, Christopher Sims has criticized the assumptions underlying large macro-econometric models built by Klein Sims, 1980. Also, many economists have questioned the suitability of estimation methods employed by large structural models and the usefulness of simple autoregressive models for approximating economic systems.
In hisyears, he was constructing short range "current quarter models" that usage current economic indicators to receive a handle on the rate of economic growth during the current and next quarter. In contrast to earlier efforts to model the economy structurally and to use constant adjustments and judgmental estimates for the exogenous variables, these systems are deliberately automatic and mechanical, simply translating usable information into a statistically best estimate of current conditions. This represents a very different tradition from his earlier model building and applications.
After formal retirement and until his death he was engaged in macro econometric model building high-frequency models that project the economy in a monthly, quarterly frame. A publication on high frequency model containing countries such as US, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Korea and Hong Kong was expected in 2008.
Klein was a founding trustee of Economists for Peace and Security.
He died at the age of 93 in his home on October 20, 2013.