Profile Major Works Resources

Warren Milton Persons, 1878-1937

 

Statistician and economist at Harvard.

Warren M. Persons was educated at the University of Wisconsin, obtaining his Ph.D in 1916.  Persons hired by Charles J. Bullock for the Committee of the Economic Research at  Harvard in 1919.   Persons was the creator of the "three curve barometer", an indicator of turns in the business cycle, first published in 1919.  Persons became the head of the "Harvard Economic Service", a semi-private, semi-academic business forecasting service based on his barometer. He was also the first editor of the HES's house journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics.  A pioneer in the methods of seasonal adjustment and trend-elimination in time-series.  Persons left Harvard in 1928, right before the barometer project collapsed.

 

 

  

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Major Works of Warren M. Persons

  • "The Quantity Theory as Tested by Kemmerer", 1908, QJE
  • "The Correlation of Economic Statistics", 1910, Quarterly of ASA
  • Statistical Averages, 1914 - review
  • "Review of Moore's Economic Cycles", 1915, AER
  • "Construction of a Business Barometer Based upon Annual Data", 1916, AER
  • "Review of Moore's Forecasting the Yield and Price of Cotton", 1918, AER
  • "Indices of Business Condition", 1919, REStat
  • Indices of General Business Conditions, 1919
  • "A Non-Technical Explanation of the Index of General Business Conditions", 1920, REStat
  • Measuring and Forecasting of General Business Conditions, 1922 [bk]
  • Interpretation of the Index of General Business Conditions, 1922 [bk]
  • "Statistics and Economic Theory", 1925, REStat
  • "The Construction and Interpretation of the Harvard Index of Business Confidence", with C.J. Bullock and W.L. Crum, 1927 REStat
  • The Construction of Index Numbers, 1928
  • Forecasting Business Cycles, 1931.
  • Government Experimentation in Business, 1934

 
HET

 
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Resources on  Warren Persons

  • Harvard Economic Service Weekly Letters, v.1 (1922)
  • "Warren Milton Persons" by William T. Foster, 1939, JASA
  • "Warren Persons, the Harvard Economic Service, and the Problems of Forecasting" by Walter A. Friedman, 2007

 

 
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