Edwin Mansfield

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Edwin Mansfield (* 1930 in Kingston , New York , USA ; † November 17, 1997 in Wallingford , Pennsylvania ) was an economist at the University of Pennsylvania .

Life

Mansfield was born in Kingston, New York (USA) in 1930, but grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey. At Dartmouth College , he received his Bachelor Accounts, the Royal Statistical Society awarded him the diploma and at Duke University , he finally received his doctoral degree .

After brief teaching at Carnegie Mellon University , Yale University and Harvard University , he was appointed professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, where he taught until shortly before his death and, since 1985, the post of director of the Center for Economics and technology held. In 1978 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Mansfield also worked as a consultant to several institutions, including the World Bank , ExxonMobil and SmithKline , mostly with the aim of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of research and development . He was also a member of the Board of Directors of the American Productivity and Quality Center and Chairman of the Visiting Committee at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute .

Mansfield died of cancer on November 17, 1997, aged 67, at his Wallingford , Pennsylvania home .

He was married to Lucile Howe Mansfield (* 1955?) And had two children, Edward and Elizabeth .

plant

Mansfield was primarily concerned with the diffusion of innovations . He came to the conclusion that state investments in private-sector R&D projects help the public (the national economy) far more than the companies involved. According to his research, the greatest economic success of R&D in the post-war period was not achieved in the high-tech sector, but in the textile industry .

He also tried to test Schumpeter's hypothesis that larger companies are more capable of innovation, but came to no statistically significant result.

Kenneth Arrow , Nobel laureate in economics, called Mansfield a “dominant figure for our view of the innovation economy today” and certified that he had created a “very solid theoretical and empirical working basis”.

Other fields of research for which Mansfield made important contributions are price theory , the determination of the influence of academic research on technological change and the empirical investigation of patenting behavior in industry. The latter consolidated the use of patent statistics in innovation research.

Since the early 1970s, he has also been the author of textbooks on microeconomics , economics for management decisions , and econometrics , which have sold more than a million copies, are used at over 1,000 US universities and have been translated into several languages.

Monographs:

  • (1968) Mansfield: Industrial Research and Technological Innovation: An Econometric Analysis
  • (1968) Mansfield: The Economics of Technological Change
  • (1971) Mansfield, Rapoport, Schnee et al .: New Research and Innovation in the Modern Corporation
  • (1971) Mansfield: Technological Change: An Introduction to a Vital Area of ​​Modern Economics
  • (1977) Mansfield, Rapoport, Romeo et al .: The Production and Application of New Industrial Technology
  • (1982) Mansfield, Romeo et al .: Technology Transfer, Productivity and Economic Policy
  • (1995) Mansfield: Innovation, Technology and the Economy

Mansfield was also involved as a writer and participant in the television series Economics U $ A , in which problems of micro- and macroeconomics were made accessible to a wide audience. At Lehigh University , he also taught one of the earliest technology management television courses.

Awards

Mansfield was the first American economist to be invited to speak in the People's Republic of China in 1979 .

Mansfield has received many awards for his research on the economics of technological change, such as the 1982 Publication Award from the Patent Law Association , the 1992 Honor Award from the National Technological University , the 1994 Special Creativity Award from the US National Science Foundation , and the Kenan in 1996 Enterprise Award and the Prentice Hall Award . He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the Econometric Society and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University . He has also received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Fulbright Program .

From 1971 to 1985 Mansfield was one of the top 20 most cited economists in the United States.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Almanac, University of Pennsylvania, November 25, 1997, Volume 44, No. 14 (English)
  2. ↑ a b Obituary in the New York Times
  3. ↑ a b Arthur M. Diamond: Edwin Mansfield's contributions to the economics of technology. 2003
  4. ↑ Kenneth J. Arrow: Preface: Edwin Mansfield's Research on technology and innovation. In: International Journal of Technology Management. No. 19, 2000, pp. 1-2
personal data
SURNAME Mansfield, Edwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist
DATE OF BIRTH 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingston , New York , USA
DATE OF DEATH November 17, 1997
Place of death Wallingford , Pennsylvania