Lawrence R. Klein is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1980 "for the creation of economic models and their application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies." . His Nobel citation states 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."

EcoMod is honored to have Lawrence Klein as a keynote contributor to its conferences.

Klein began model building while still a graduate student. After getting his PhD from MIT in 1944, he moved on to the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, then at the University of Chicago. While there he built a model of the U.S. economy with the goal of forecasting economic conditions and estimating the impact of changes in government spending, taxes, and other policies.

Klein was one of the pioneers in building and using macroeconomic models. One of his earliest successes was in forecasting economic conditions at the end of World War II. Whereas many economists speculated that the war's end would bring another depression, Klein predicted that the unsatisfied demand for consumer goods throughout the war, combined with the purchasing power of returning soldiers, would likely prevent a depression; his prediction was right.

Klein's research produced a series of increasingly detailed and sophisticated models of economic activity. The Wharton Models found wide use in forecasting gross national product, exports, investment, and consumption. A more ambitious effort, the LINK project, incorporated data gathered from a large number of industrialized, centrally planned, and developing countries to forecast trade and capital movements and to test the effects of proposed changes in political and economic policies.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1980/klein.html#