Ragnar Frisch

Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch was a Norwegian economist who shared the inaugural Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969 with the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, the first time the discipline received a Nobel Prize. He is generally credited with coining the terms "econometrics" and "macroeconomics" and with founding the Econometric Society in 1930.

Born in Oslo in 1895 into a family of goldsmiths, he initially trained in his father's craft before turning to economics at the University of Oslo, where he completed his degree in 1919. After further study in France, Germany, Britain, and the United States, he returned to Oslo and was appointed professor of economics in 1931, holding the chair until his retirement in 1965.

His 1933 paper Propagation Problems and Impulse Problems in Dynamic Economics introduced a model in which economic cycles arise from the propagation of random shocks through a system of difference equations, an approach now central to modern dynamic macroeconomic modelling. He also wrote on consumer theory, production theory, and economic planning, and edited Econometrica for its first twenty-two years.

During the German occupation of Norway he was arrested in 1943 and held for more than a year in concentration camps at Bredtveit, Berg, and Grini, an experience he spoke about only sparingly in later life. After the war he advised governments and international agencies on planning models, including missions to Egypt and India. He died in Oslo in 1973.

The forename Ragnar is from the Old Norse Ragnarr, formed from regin, meaning counsel or the gods, and herr, meaning warrior or army, traditionally read as something close to "warrior of the gods." It is one of the most distinctly Scandinavian male given names in European usage, and his work is the reason it appears regularly in citation lists of mid-twentieth-century economic theory.