The Working Brothers

The two brothers, Holbrook Working and Elmer Joseph Working, were both distinguished statisticians who made seminal contributions to the early development of econometrics.

Holbrook Working, 1895-1985.

Originating from Colorado, the elder brother Holbrook Working obtained his M.A. at Cornell, and went on to receive a Ph.D. in agricultural economics at Wisconsin.  After a period teaching at Minnesota, Working joined Stanford's Food Research Institute in 1925.

Working's article on demand (1925 - which preceded that of Schultz), was one of the earliest demonstrations of the "identification" problem, albeit he saw it merely as a data problem and not a theoretical one. His early sympathy with the work of Slutsky and the "probability approach" was also prescient.

Perhaps his greater claim to fame is in the theory of finance where Holbrook Working advanced theories on futures markets and hedging. In particular, Working challenged Keynes's (1923, 1930) view that hedgers on futures markets paid a risk premium to speculators in order to divest themselves of all risk. Working (1953, 1962) claimed that hedgers still bear risk - but of a different type, namely quantity risk. Thus hedging, in Working's view, was merely a way of arbitraging between two markets - the spot and the futures.

• "The Statistical Determination of Demand Curves", 1925, QJE
• "Review of Mitchell, 1928, JASA
• "A Random Difference Series for Use in the Analysis of Time Series", 1934, JASA [pdf]
• "Differential Price Behavior as a Subject for Commodity Price Analysis", 1935, Econometrica
• "The Investigation of Economic Expectations", 1949, AER [pdf]
• "Futures Trading and Hedging", 1953, AER
• "Hedging Reconsidered", 1953, J of Farm Economics
• "Note on the correlation of first differences of averages in a random chain", 1960, Econometrica [pdf]
• "New Concepts Concerning Futures Markets and Prices", 1962,AER
• "Tests of a Theory Concerning Floor Trading on Commodity Exchanges", 1967, Food Research Institute Studies

Elmer Joseph Working, 1900-1968.

The real discoverer of true nature of the "identification" problem in econometrics and the first to suggest that the solution to it is at least partly theoretical. His specific suggestion was that theory be used to pre-adjust the data. Working's survey of statistical studies of demand (1934) is authoritative and prescient in recognizing the importance of econometrics for both economic theory and policy.

• "What do Statistical Demand Curves Show?", 1927, QJE
• "Demand Studies during Times of Rapid Economic Change", 1934, Econometrica

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