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Concept
James Tobin
Summary
James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation and advocated government intervention in particular to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored dependent variables, the well-known tobit model.
Along with fellow neo-Keynesian economist James Meade in 1977, Tobin proposed nominal GDP targeting as a monetary policy rule in 1980. Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981 for "creative and extensive work on the analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices."
Outside academia, Tobin was widely known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the "Tobin tax." This was designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.
Tobin was born on March 5, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois. His father was Louis Michael Tobin (b. 1879), a journalist working at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His father had fought in World War I, was a member of the first Greek organization at Illinois (Delta Tau Delta fraternity Beta Upsilon chapter), and was credited as the inventor of "Homecoming." His mother, Margaret Edgerton Tobin (b. 1893), was a social worker. Tobin attended the University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, a laboratory school in the University's campus.
In 1935, on his father's advice, Tobin took the entrance exams for Harvard University. Despite no special preparation for the exams, he passed and was admitted with a national scholarship from the university.
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