Background
CHRISTENSEN, Laurits Ray was born in 1941 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, United States of America.
CHRISTENSEN, Laurits Ray was born in 1941 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, United States of America.
Bachelor of Arts Cornell University, 1964. Master of Science (Statistics), Doctor of Philosophy University California Berkeley, 1960, 1968.
Consultant, United States Treasury,
1971-1972, United States Bureau Labor Statistics, 1972-1973. Visiting Association Professor, University British Columbia, Canada, 1973. Professor of Economics, University Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
President, Laurits R. Christensen Association Incorporated,
1981—.
Editorial Board, American Economic Review,
1976-1978.
My career in economic research has been greatly influenced by the work of my mentor, Dale West. Jorgenson. I spent the first several years following my Doctor of Philosophy collaborating with Jorgenson on several projects. We developed a system of national economic accounts that emphasised consistency of interrelationships.
We applied the system to the United States of America and later to several other countries. Jorgenson, Lawrence J. Lau and I developed the ideas for translog functional forms at Berkeley during the summer of 1969. This provided the basis for much of my subsequent empirical work.
In 1971 I began a series of collaborations with my Doctor of Philosophy students at the
University of Wisconsin, involving more microeconomic data sets, first aggregate manufacturing data and later individual firm data for electric utilities, railroads, airlines, et cetera
The principal contributions to develop from this were: (1) making use of economic principles to develop better data sets than had been used for previous industry studies. And (2) modelling the structure of cost and production in more general ways than had been the norm. Foreign example, Berndt and I were the first seriously to study substitution possibilities in situations with more than two inputs.
Greene and I were the first to use a flexible functional form to study return to scale issues. Caves and I pioneered in the area of multiproduct cost functions.
A central theme of my work throughout my career has been the proper estimation of differences in productivity across time and economic entities. My most recent work has involved extensive study of consumer behaviour at the household level in response to diurnal peak-load pricing for electricity.