Abstract
Born in Cluj, Rumania, Wald came to Vienna in 1927 to study mathematics with Karl Menger, the geometer and son of the economist Carl Menger. Menger introduced Wald to the active mathematical group in Vienna, and secured for him a position as mathematical tutor to the economist Karl Schlesinger. This led to Wald’s producing the first proofs of existence for models of general equilibrium; his analysis was based on Cassel’s restatement of the Walrasian model, as modified by Schlesinger’s treatment of free goods. These works were published in the proceedings of Menger’s mathematical colloquium, and a summary was published in the Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie in 1936. These papers were remarkable for their time and, with von Neumann’s paper on equilibrium in a model of an expanding economy, are the first significant contributions to the mathematical analysis of general equilibrium models in economics. Wald is the link between the early work by Walras and the later work by Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu and Lionel McKenzie on the existence of competitive equilibria.
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1934. Über die eindeutige positive Lösbarkeit der neuen Produktions gleichungen I. In Ergebnisse eines mathematischen Kolloquiums, 1933–34, ed. K. Menger. Trans. by W. Baumol as ‘On the unique non-negative solvability of the new production equations, part I’, in Precursors in Mathematical Economics, ed. W.J. Baumol and S.M. Goldfeld, London School of Economics Series of Reprints of Scarce Works on Political Economy No. 19, London: London School of Economics, 1968.
1935. Über die Produktionsgleichungen der ökonomischen Wertlehre II. In Ergebnisse eines mathematischen Kolloquiums, 1934–35, ed. K. Menger. Trans. by W. Baumol as ‘On the production equations of economic value theory, part II’, in Precursors in Mathematical Economics, ed. W.J. Baumol and S.M. Goldfeld, London School of Economics Series of Reprints of Scarce Works on Political Economy No. 19, London: London School of Economics, 1968.
1936. Über einige Gleichungssysteme der mathematischen Ökonomie. Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie. Trans. by O. Eckstein as ‘On some systems of equations in mathematical economics’, Econometrica 19(4), October 1951, 368–403.
1947. Sequential Analysis. New York: John Wiley.
1950. Statistical Decision Functions. New York: John Wiley.
1955. Selected Papers in Statistics and Probability. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Weintraub, E.R. (1990). Abraham Wald. In: Eatwell, J., Milgate, M., Newman, P. (eds) Time Series and Statistics. The New Palgrave. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20865-4_42
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