Haavelmo, Trygve (1911-1999)

Norwegian economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1989 for his work in econometrics, published as Probability Approach in Econometrics (1944). After 1947, he turned away from econometrics to the economic theory of investment and the study of economic development as his main fields of interest.

Before Haavelmo, economic data subjected to statistical analysis was thought to be generated by a deterministic process whose only problem was that it was only a known part of all the unknown data. After Haavelmo, all economists understood that economic data was generated by a stochastic (randomly determined) process that generated a part of the known data, plus an unknown amount of accidental ‘noise’ that might or might not have anything to do with the economy. Econometrics, the measurement of economic relationships, has not been the same since.

Haavelmo graduated from the University of Oslo in 1933 and joined Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch's newly created Institute of Economics as a research assistant. He left Norway after the outbreak of World War II and worked at the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago, returning to Norway in 1947. He was professor of economics at the University of Oslo in 1948 until his retirement in 1979.

His publications include A Study in the Theory of Economic Evolution (1954) and A Study in the Theory of Investment (1960).