Lawrence R. Klein, 1920-2013

One of the great figures of econometrics passed away yesterday. Lawrence Klein was the father of whole-economy macroeconometric modelling, and his massive contributions to this field earned him the Nobel Prize in 1980.

Klein created some of the earliest simultaneous equations models of the U.S. economy (e.g., see here), and he was the driving force behind countless such models for other economies around the world. Among other things, Klein was responsible for the foundation of Project LINK, in 1968. This ambitious endeavour now brings together econometric models for 78 countries to provide a "world econometric model".

Lawrence Klein shaped econometric modelling, and his passing marks the end of an amazing era.

Businessweek's obituary for Lawrence Klein can be found here.

© 2013, David E. Giles

A "Segmented" Regression Problem

Here's a little exercise for the students among you.

Suppose that we want to fit a least squares regression model that allows for a "break" in the underlying relationship at a particular sample value for the regressor(s). In addition, we want to make sure that the fitted model passes through that sample value.

In other words, we want to end up with a fitted model that gives a result such as this:

Here, the two segments of the regression line "join" when X=30. What's a simple way to achieve this?

© 2013, David E. Giles