Background
Mundlak, Yair was born on June 6, 1927 in Pinsk, Poland. Arrived in Israel, 1927. Son of Lipa and Batia (Bodankin) Mundlak.
agriculture and economics educator
Mundlak, Yair was born on June 6, 1927 in Pinsk, Poland. Arrived in Israel, 1927. Son of Lipa and Batia (Bodankin) Mundlak.
Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Economics with highest honors, University of California, Davis, 1953; Master of Science in Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, 1956; Doctor of Philosophy in Agricultural Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 1957.
Professor agricultural economics, Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 1956-1985;
head department agricultural economics, Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 1965-1973;
director research Center for Agricultural Economics Research, Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 1968-1985;
dean faculty agriculture, Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 1972-1974;
visiting professor economics, University of Chicago, 1966-1967, 78-85;
F.H. Prince professor economics, University of Chicago, since 1978. Visiting professor agricultural economics University of California, Berkeley, 1961-1963. Visiting professor economics Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974-1976.
Research fellow International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, since 1976. Visiting fellow Congress of Racial Equality, Louvain, Belgium, 1973. Visiting research fellow World Bank, 1990-1991.
Consultant Ministry Agriculture, Development Research Center The World Bank, Washington, 1972. Member research committees National Council for Research and Development, 1964-1974.
My main interest has been to understand and to quantify the economic performance of the agricultural sector. lieutenant started with empirical analysis of supply response in California and later on continued with the analysis of family farms in Israel. This work brought out the quantitative effect of the distribution of entrepreneurial capacity on that of income as well as the estimation of production and behavioural functions.
Consequently it led to a formulation of the behavioural functions of the firms within a recursive framework which was to modify, and in parts to replace, the distributed lag analysis. lieutenant was also indicated that some of the then reported results on distributed lag analysis were misinterpreted due to negligence on the effect of aggregation over time of dynamic processes. The upshot of this analysis was that in empirical analysis we should endogenise the dynamic pattern of supply response.
This framework has been applied in my current work on sectoral growth as described below. The statistical aspects of this work required the correct formulation of pooling cross-section and time series data, which also placed the relationships between fixed and random effect within an appropriate framework. In another direction, I showed how the problems arising from multicollinearity can be overcome by combining principal components and multiple comparisons.
The other major aspect of my work has dealt with the agricultural sector and its relation to the rest of the economy.
In order to submit this relationship to empirical analysis, it is necessary to modify the neoclassical framework so as to endogenise the process of resource allocation and the selection of production techniques as well as to integrate in a meaningful way short-term macro analysis with the long-run growth processes. My recent monographs report preliminary results on the applications of this approach to sectoral growth in Japan and Argentina.
President board of trustees Israel Foundation, 1977-1988. Fellow Econometric Society. Member Phi Beta Kappa.
100 Economic Growth; 710 Agricultural Economics. 200 Econometrics.
Married Yaffa Mundlak. Children: Tal, Yaelle, Guy.