Victor Zarnowitz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Victor Zarnowitz (born November 3, 1919 in Łańcut , Poland , † February 21, 2009 in New York City ) was a Polish-American economist.

Life

Victor Zarnowitz, son of the Polish literary scholar Leopold Zarnowitz , was born in Łańcut and spent his childhood in Oświęcim .

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he and his brother Tadek fled east, where they were taken prisoner by the Soviets and interned in a Siberian labor camp. His brother Tadek died in the camp, and Victor Zarnowitz later managed to escape and return to his parents.

After the end of World War II , he studied economics and in 1951 with one of Erich Preiser supervised dissertation on the theory of income distribution at the Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg summa cum laude doctorate .

In 1952 he moved to the USA with his parents and lived in New York. He initially worked in the analysis of economic data. In 1959 he became a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business

In 1975 he became known throughout the USA with a study of economic forecasts from 1962 to 1974. In his study, he was able to prove that the research institutes had incorrectly calculated the US gross national product four times.

From 1999 until his death he was a consultant and member of the Conference Board , a prominent non-profit organization that publishes a monthly consumer confidence index for the USA . As a consultant to the National Bureau of Economic Research , he was one of seven economists to determine that the United States was at the beginning of a deep recession in 2008.

Victor Zarnowitz dealt in his scientific work in particular with business cycles and forecast models as well as assessments of economic developments. He was co-editor of the Journal of Business, Economic Forecasts and the ASA-NBER Quarterly Survey of Economic Outlook.

In 2008 he published the autobiography "Fleeing the Nazis, Surviving the Gulag, and Arriving in the Free World".

He died of a heart attack. His wife Lena Engelman died in 2000. The marriage resulted in two sons.

Fonts

  • The theory of income distribution. Development and current status , Mohr Siebeck Tübingen 1951 (dissertation)
  • Fleeing the Nazis, Surviving the Gulag, and Arriving in the Free World , Praeger 2008

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Zarnowitz, Victor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-American economist
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Łańcut , Poland
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 2009
Place of death New York City