1999: Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association

Excerpted from:  The American Economic Review , Sep., 2000, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Sep., 2000)

JOHN S. CHIPMAN

DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

1999

John Chipman is a scholar in the best sense of that term. Although most of his research has been motivated by questions in international economics, his  study of those questions has led him also to make original and important  contributions to microeconomic theory, econometric theory, and the history of economic thought.  

In international trade theory, he is especially noted not only for work on factor price equalization and the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem but also for his  monumental 1964 Econometrica three-part survey, which contains numerous  extensions of the material he surveyed. In microeconomics, his contributions  include his classic 1970 paper on competitive equilibrium with increasing  returns to the scale of the industry and his extensive work on the new welfare  economics. Especially notable is his 1979 paper (with Jim Moore) on the  conditions that give rise to a welfare function for a country.

Chipman' s view, as enunciated in lectures, is that international trade theory  departs from general-equilibrium theory by making special assumptions (for  example, few goods and factors) that make it possible to go beyond saying  that anything can happen as a result of a change in a policy. His exploration  of the validity and plausibility of the standard simplifying assumptions has led  him to do extensive work on the theory of aggregation and to embark on  extensive empirical work. The empirical work, in turn, has inspired original  contributions to econometric theory. Illustrative of his careful work in econo-  metric theory is his 1979 paper on least squares with autocorrelated residuals.

Chipman's work on the history of economic thought is unrivaled. It ranges  over the entire field of economics and extends into statistics and mathematics.  For his work on the literature of economics, he was awarded the Luck Prize by the National Academy of Sciences in 1981.

Chipman's contributions to international trade theory, microeconomic theory, econometrics, and the history of economic thought set a standard of breadth and excellence that very few attain. The economics profession is honored to have him as a member.