Ragnar Frisch

Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch (3 March 1895 – 31 January 1973) was an influential Norwegian economist and econometrician known for being one of the major contributors to establishing economics as a quantitative and statistically informed science in the early 20th century. He coined the term econometrics in 1926 for utilising statistical methods to describe economic systems, as well as the terms microeconomics and macroeconomics in 1933, for describing individual and aggregate economic systems, respectively.

He was the first to develop a statistically informed model of business cycles in 1933. Later work on the model, together with Jan Tinbergen, won the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969. Frisch became dr.philos. with a thesis on mathematics and statistics at the University of Oslo in 1926. After his doctoral thesis, he spent five years researching in the United States at the University of Minnesota and Yale University.

After teaching briefly at Yale from 1930–31, he was offered a full professorship in economics, which he declined after pressures by colleagues to return to the University of Oslo. After returning to Oslo, Frisch was first appointed by the King-in-Council as Professor of Economics and Statistics at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo (then the Royal Frederick University) in 1931, before becoming leader of the newly founded Institute of Economics at the University of Oslo in 1932.

He remained at the University of Oslo until his retirement in 1965.