Tjalling C. Koopmans
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Tjalling C. Koopmans
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1975
Born: 28 August 1910, 's Graveland, the Netherlands
Died: 26 February 1985, New Haven, CT, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Prize motivation: “for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
Tjalling Koopmans was born in Graveland, the Netherlands. He went to the University of Utrecht at age 17. He studied mathematics, psychology, psychiatry and theoretical physics before switching to mathematical economics under Jan Tinbergen in Amsterdam. In 1940, he went to the United States. He joined the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at University of Chicago in 1944 and followed as it relocated to Yale in 1955.
Work
In a series of works, Tjalling Koopmans developed the so-called activity analysis. Within this theory, new ways of interpreting the relationship between inputs and outputs of a production process are used to clarify the correspondence between efficiency in production and the existence of a system of calculation prices. In addition to the contributions he made to the normative theory of allocation of resources, Koopmans did distinguished work in the field of econometric methods.
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