Zvi Griliches

Zvi Griliches made pioneering contributions to the empirical measurement of technological change. His 1957 dissertation on the diffusion of hybrid corn demonstrated how agricultural innovations spread, forming the basis for the economics of innovation.

He spent much of his prolific career at Harvard University, where he served as the chair of the economics department. Prior to joining Harvard in 1969, he taught at the University of Chicago.

Griliches developed sophisticated techniques for creating "hedonic price indexes" to adjust for quality changes in goods like automobiles and computers. This allowed economists to separate pure price inflation from price increases driven by product improvements.

Zvi Griliches was a highly influential Lithuanian-American economist who lived from 1930 to 1999. He survived the Holocaust in Europe before eventually moving to the United States and becoming a U.S. citizen.