Klein, Lawrence Robert (1920-2013), an American economist, won the 1980 Nobel Prize in economic sciences. He received the award for pioneering the use of computers to forecast economic activity. Klein put economic relationships into a mathematical form that could be analyzed by computer.
In one of his best-known projects, Klein developed a set of mathematical formulas, called a model, to describe the United States economy. The model dealt with the relationships among such elements as income, prices, and unemployment.
Klein was also known for his leadership of Project LINK, an effort launched in 1968 to develop a model of the world economy. Under the project, economists from around the world create economic models of individual countries and link these models together to study how the world’s economies affect one another.
Klein was born on Sept. 14, 1920, in Omaha, Nebraska, and received a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began teaching economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958. He retired from full-time teaching in 1991. Klein’s books include A Textbook of Econometrics (1953) and An Essay on the Theory of Economic Prediction (1968). Klein died on Oct. 20, 2013.
