ABSTRACT
Moses Abramovitz was William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History, Emeritus, at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was born in New York City in 1912 and died in Stanford in 2000. He was educated at Harvard College (B.A., 1932) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1939), and began his long association with the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1938. During World War II he served at the War Production Board and at the Office of Strategic Services. After two more years at the NBER, he was professor of American Economic History at Stanford University from 1948 until his retirement in 1977. Abramovitz was elected Fellow of The American Statistical Association and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, both in 1960, was named Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 1976, and was elected Foreign Member of the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei (Roma) in 1991. He was President of the American Economic Association (1980), of the Western Economic Association (1989), and of the Economic History Association (1992). From 1981 through 1985 he was Managing Editor of The Journal of Economic Literature and continued as its Associate Editor through 1993. He was honored with a Festschrift edited by Paul David and Melvin Reder, Nations and Households in Economic Growth (Academic Press, 1974). He completed Days Gone By: A Memoir for my Family (2001) only a few months before his death. A J. F, of Santa Clara University, conducted the interview at the offices of the JEL at Stanford on December 9th and 16th, 1992. Field writes:
Moses Abramovitz was one of a select group of scholars whose path-breaking empirical work has vastly expanded our understanding of the dimensions and determinants of economic growth and fluctuations in the industrializing and industrialized countries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is best known for his work on inventories, which identified the critical role of fluctuations in inventory investment in short-term
cycles in output, for his studies of long swings of growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for his work separating the relative contributions of technical change and capital accumulation to economic growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for his research on catch-up and convergence: the closing of the productivity gap between the United States and its competitors in Western Europe and Japan.
