Edmond Malinvaud

Edmond Malinvaud (25 April 1923 – 7 March 2015) was a French economist.

He was the first president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Trained at the École Polytechnique and at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique (ENSAE) in Paris, Malinvaud was a student of Maurice Allais.

In 1950, Malinvaud left Allais to join the Cowles Commission in the United States.

At Cowles, Malinvaud produced work in many directions.

His famous article, "Capital Accumulation and the Efficient Allocation of Resources" (1953), provided an intertemporal theory of capital for general equilibrium theory and introduced the concept of dynamic efficiency.

He became director of the ENSAE (1962–1966), director of the forecast department of French Treasury (1972–1974), director of the INSEE (1974–1987) and Professor at the Collège de France (1988–1993).

He also worked on uncertainty theory, notably the theory of "first order certainty equivalence" (1969) and the relationship between individual risks and social risks (1972, 1973).

His microeconomics textbook (Lectures in microeconomic theory) and his econometrics textbook, Statistical Methods in Econometrics, have since become classics.

Malinvaud's main contribution to macroeconomics is represented in his slim 1977 book, Theory of Unemployment Reconsidered which provided a clear and unified reconstruction of dynamic "disequilibrium" macroeconomics; this theory built on previous results of Clower, Leijonhufvud, and "Non-Walrasian" theory.

Malinvaud's influence on the subsequent generation of European economists has been profound.