Don Patinkin - Biography

Don Patinkin (Hebrew: דן פטינקין) (January 8, 1922 – August 7, 1995) was an Israeli/American monetary economist, and the president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Biography

Patinkin was born January 8, 1922, in Chigago, to a family of Jewish emigrants from Belarus. While doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, he also studied the Talmud at the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago. He continued at Chicago for his graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1947 under the supervision of Oskar R. Lange. Patinkin was a strong Zionist and, while doing his graduate studies, already planned to emigrate to Palestine; in his graduate research he studied Palestinian economics, with a view to making his emigration case stronger, although he did not complete his thesis in this subject. After graduating he held lecturer positions at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois until he succeeded in emigrating to Israel in 1949, where he was hired by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He remained at the Hebrew University for the rest of his career and was university president from 1982 to 1986, but resigned due to the poor state of the university's finances. He retired in 1989, and died August 7, 1995 in Jerusalem.

Research

Patinkin's work explored some of the microfoundations of Keynesian macroeconomics, particularly the role of money demand. His monograph Money, Interest, and Prices (1956) was for many years one of the most widely-used advanced references on monetary economics.

Publications

• "Mercantilism and the Readmission of Jews in England", 1946, Jewish Social Studies
• "Multiple-Plant Firms, Cartels and Imperfect Competition", 1947, QJE.
• "Relative Prices, Say's Law, and the Demand for Money", 1948, Econometrica.
• "Price Flexibility and Full Employment", 1948, AER.
• "The Indeterminacy of Absolute Prices in Classical Economic Theory", 1949, Econometrica.
• "Involuntary Unemployment and the Keynesian Supply Function", 1949, EJ.
• "A Reconsideration of the General Equilibrium Theory of Money", 1950, RES.
• "The Invalidity of Classical Monetary Theory", 1951, Econometrica.
• "Further Considerations of the General Equilibrium Theory of Money", 1951, RES.
• "The Limitations of Samuelson's `Correspondence Principle'", 1952, Metroeconomica.
• "Wicksell's `Cumulative Process'", 1952, EJ.
• "Dichotomies of the Pricing Process in Economic Theory", 1954, Economica.
• "Keynesian Economics and the Quantity Theory", 1954, in Kurihara, editor, Post-Keynesian Economics.
• "Monetary and Price Developments in Israel", 1955, Scripta Hierosolymitana.
• "Money, Interest and Prices: An integration of monetary and value theory", 1956.
• "Liquidity Preference and Loanable Funds: Stock and flow analysis", 1958, Economica.
• "Secular Price Movements and Economic Development: Some theoretical aspects", in Bonne, editor, The Challenge of Development.
• "The Israel Economy: The first decade", 1959.

Awards and honors

Patinkin was awarded the Israel Prize in 1970. In 1989, a conference was held in honor of Patinkin's retirement.

Additional reading

• R. Dimand (2008), Monetary economics, history of, article in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
• N. Liviatan (2006), Don Patinkin's contribution to monetary theory, Israel Economic Review
• D. Rozborilova (2003), Profiles of World Economists: Don Israel Patinkin

External links

• Inventory of the Don Patinkin Papers, 1870-1995, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Also includes life chronology.
• References to Patinkin's 'classic' work (on dust jacket of Woodford textbook)

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients