In an earlier post we met the Ruggles Family Dynasty, three generations of economists with Harvard economics Ph.Ds. Silly me that I thought that this might have been a unique constellation, but in the meantime I have “discovered” a second observation. Meet the Orcutt-Nakamura dynasty of economists! Painstaking empirical analysis reveals that both dynasties display a greater frequency of women economists (including the spouses), than the frequency for the entire population of economists.
Thus, with all the power vested in me from this second observation, I hereby declare Collier’s conjecture on economist-dynasties: the economist-gene is carried on the X chromosome.
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1st Generation: Guy Henderson Orcutt
(Ph.D. from Michigan, 1944)
Guy Henderson Orcutt (b. 5 July 1917 in Wyandotte, Michigan; d. 5 March 2006 in Bowie, Prince Georges, Maryland)
B.S. with honors, Physics (1939)
M.A. Economics (1940)
Ph.D. (1944) University of Michigan
Dissertation Title: Statistical Methods and Tools for Finding Natural Laws in the Field of Economics
Taught or affiliated with MIT, Cambridge, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Yale, IMF, World Bank and The Urban Institute.
Guy Orcutt material transcribed for Economics in the Rear-view Mirror:
Economics 110. Introduction to Econometrics. Harvard, Spring Semester 1950.
A Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Scientific Method
Economics 110a. Empirical Economics. Harvard, Fall Semester 1950.
Course Readings
Autobiographical/Biographical material
Guy Orcutt, “From engineering to microsimulation: An autobiographical reflection” In Special issue “Orcutt Festschrift” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Vol. 14, No. 1 (September 1990), pp. 5-27.
Harold W. Watts. An Appreciation of Guy Orcutt, Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. Journal of Economic Perspectives Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 1991) pp. 171-179.
Guy Henderson Orcutt page at the Prabook website.
Image source: Ugo Colombino’s lecture Microsimulation and Microeonometrics: Survey, Interpretation and Perspectives. (Università degli studi di Torino, Campus Luigi Einaudi) April 1, 2015. Slide #3.
2nd Generation: Alice Orcutt Nakamura
(Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, 1972)
Alice O. Nakamura (b. Boston, Mass., 1945)
B.S. in Economics (Political Science minor), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1968
Ph.D. in Political Economy with a minor in Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, 1973
Dissertation Title: State and Local Police Expenditures: An Empirical Investigation.
Professor of Finance and Management Science at University of Alberta
Biographical/Professional Information
Apr. 4, 2019 archived webpage of Alice Orcutt Nakamura.
Alice O. Nakamura’s c.v. (June 2017)
Alice O. Nakamura’s Short Biography
March 31, 2019 archived
Alice Nakamura is a Professor of Finance and Management Science at the University of Alberta. She holds a Ph.D in Economics from John Hopkins University and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Economics Associations. In 1994-95, she served as President of the Canadian Economics Association. She has received numerous honors, including begin an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Western Ontario, the Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research, and the McCalla Research Professorship. She has also held numerous public policy and advisory roles, including being a member of the Axworthy Social Security Reform Task Force, the Statistics Canada Price Measurement Advisory Committee and the Co-chair of the Canadian Employment Research Forum (CERF). Her publications are in the areas of labour economics, econometrics, price and productivity measurement, social policy, and genomic statistics among other topics. She has numerous publications in the most prestigious journals in economics and statistics, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Canadian Journal of Economics.
Image Source: Alice Nakamura’s webpage.
Alice Nakamura is married to Masao Nakamura
B.S., Keio University (Tokyo), 1967 in Administration Engineering
M.S. Keio University (Tokyo), 1969 in Administration Engineering
Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. 1972 in Operations Research/ Industrial Engineering
Title of Dissertation: Mathematical analysis and optimization of health services systems.
Dissertation Adviser: Rodger Parker
Professor of Commerce & Business Administration (Emeritus)
Strategy & Business Economics Division, Sauder School of Business
University of British Columbia
Masao Nakamura’s c.v. (April 2016)
Masao Nakamura’s Personal webpage (Nov. 30, 2018)
2nd Generation: Harriet L. Orcutt Duleep
Harriet L. Orcutt born 1953.
B.A., Oberlin Conservatory/College, 1973
B.A., in Economics, University of Michigan, 1976
Ph.D. in Economics, M.I.T., 1986
Title of Dissertation: Poverty and Inequality of Mortality.
Advisers: Jerry Hausman and Lester Thurow.
Research Professor of Public Policy, College of William and Mary since 2007.
3rd generation: Emi Nakamura
(Harvard Ph.D., 2007)
Emi Nakamura (b. 1980)
A.B. (summa cum laude) Princeton University, 2001
A.M. Economics, Harvard University, 2004.
Ph.D. Economics, Harvard University, 2007.
Dissertation Title: Price Adjustment, Pass-through and Monetary Policy
Advisers: Robert Barro and Ariel Pakes
Emi Nakamura is Chancellor’s Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley since 2018.
Emi Nakamura’s c.v. (January 2019)
Image source: Emi Nakamura’s home page.
From an Interview with Emi Nakamura
Can you tell us something about growing up in an academic family of economists?
My parents love their work and really wanted to give me a sense of what they did. That’s easy when your parents are firemen or policemen, but harder when your parents spend all their time sitting at a desk reading books and running regressions. How do you explain to a kid what it means to do research? So my mom brought me to a number of economics conferences when I was a child. Of course, I didn’t understand much, but I did get some sense of what it meant to be an academic economist. It also led to some funny conversations when I grew up and met colleagues like Kevin Lang, who I’d first met as a child. Because of my parents, I also got to take a bunch of economics classes at the University of British Columbia when I was in high school and over the summer when I was home from college in Vancouver, including a number of classes on economic measurement from Erwin Diewert. Measurement is a really understudied topic in economics today and you don’t learn much about it even in grad school, so that was a unique opportunity. I have since written several papers on measurement issues where this experience was very useful.
Source: CSWEP News. 2015 Issue 2. From “An Interview with Emi Nakamura” by Serena Ng.
HUGE UPDATE: John Bates Clark Medal 2019 awarded to Emi Nakamura!
Emi Nakamura is married to:
Jón Steinsson also Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley.
Jan. 2019 c.v. of Jón Steinsson.
Note: Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson have two children…[to be continued?]
Image: Guy Orcutt, Alice Nakamura, Emi Nakamura.