Irving Fisher (February 27 1867 Saugerties, New York — April 29 1947, New York) was one of the earliest American Neoclassical economists. He is one of the early propents of price indexes, and is credited with proposing the Phillips curve, the indifference curve, International Fisher Effect and the Fisher separation theorem; the Fisher equation is also named for him. He was also the first to recognize the lower zero bound for nominal interest rates.

Fisher was perhaps the first celebrity economist and a well known Yale professor, where he recieved the first Yale Ph.D in Economics in 1892. For his dissertation on economics he constructed a machine of pumps and levers to illustrate his price theory. Fisher's books and articles on economic topics contained unusual (for the time) mathematical sophistication, but he still presented all of his theories in a very lucid manner.

Fisher's reputation as a preeminent economist suffered greatly when he famously predicted, a few days before stock market crash of 1929, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." For months after the crash he continued to assure investors that a recovery was soon in coming. Once the Great Depression was in full force, he turned around and warned of the economic dangers of deflation.

Fisher became independently wealthy with his invention of the Rolodex, but lost most of it in the stock market crash.

Works

• Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices. , 1892
• Appreciation and interest, 1896
• The Nature of Capital and Income, 1906
• The Rate of Interest, 1907
• Introduction to Economic Science, 1910
• The Purchasing Power of Money, 1911
• Elementary Principles of Economics, 1911
• The best form of index number. in American Statistical Association Quarterly, 1921
• The Making of Index Numbers, 1922
• A statistical relation between unemployment and price changes, in International Labour Review, 1926
• A statistical method for measuring 'marginal utility' and testing the justice of a progressive income tax. In Economic Essays Contributed in Honor of John Bates Clark , 1927
• The Theory of Interest, 1930
• Booms and Depressions, 1932
• The debt-deflation theory of great depressions, in Econometrica, 1933
• 100% Money, 1935

External links

• Profile: Irving Fisher, 1867-1947
• Irving Fisher's Theory of Investment