Marc Nerlove

Marc Leon Nerlove (October 12, 1933 – July 10, 2024) was an American agricultural economist and econometrician and a distinguished university professor emeritus in agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland.^[1] He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1969^[2] and held appointments at eight different universities from 1958–2016. The Clark Medal is awarded to an economist under the age of 40 who “is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge”,^[3] and when the AEA appointed him as a distinguished fellow in 2012, they cited his development of widely used econometric methods across a range of subjects, including supply and demand, time series analysis, production functions, panel analysis, and family demography.^[4]

A widely known contribution by Nerlove in econometrics is the estimator for the random effects model in panel data analysis, which is implemented in most econometric software packages.^[5]