Henry Schultz

For the founder of Hamburg, South Carolina, see Henry Shultz.

Henry Schultz (September 4, 1893 – November 26, 1938) was an American economist and statistician, one of the founders of econometrics.

Life

Henry Schultz was born on September 4, 1893 in Szarkowszczyzna, the Russian Empire (now part of Belarus). His family moved to the United States, to New York City, where Henry completed his primary education, as well as undergraduate studies at the College of the City of New York, receiveing a BA in 1916. For graduate work he enrolled at Columbia University, but had to interrupt studies in 1917 because of World War I. After the war he received a scholarship which enabled him to spend 1919 at the London School of Economics and the Galton Laboratory of University College London, where he had the opportunity to attend Karl Pearson's lectures on statistics.

After returning to the US, in 1920 Schultz married to Bertha Greenstein. In the future years, the couple had two daughters, Ruth and Jean. Schultz continued studying for his doctoral degree at Columbia, while at the same time conducting statistical work for the War Trade Board, the United States Census Bureau and the United States Department of Labor. He was awarded a PhD in economics from Columbia in 1925 with a thesis on the estimation of demand curves written under the supervision of Henry L. Moore.

In 1926 Schultz went to the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career teaching and doing research. In 1930 he was one of the sixteen founding members of the Econometric Society. Henry Schultz died on November 26, 1938, near San Diego, California, in a tragic car accident that also killed his wife and his two daughters.

Work

In 1938 Schultz published The Theory and Measurement of Demand, a highly influential empirical study of the phenomenon of consumer demand.

Schultz's work shaped the thinking of Milton Friedman, one of the great modern economists.

Notes and references

• Paul H. Douglas (1939). "Henry Schultz as Colleague". Econometrica. 7 (2): 104–106.
• Harold Hotelling (1939). "The Work of Henry Schultz". Econometrica. 7 (2): 97–103.
• Theodore O. Yntema (1939). "Henry Schultz: His Contributions to Economics and Statistics". The Journal of Political Economy. 47 (2): 153–162.