BA (Honours), MA (Math) University of British Columbia, PhD (Economics) University of California, Berkeley
,
Economics
2015
Professor W. Erwin Diewert holds a joint appointment as a Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and at the School of Economics at the UNSW Business School. His early research interests prior to 1985 were in the area of applied microeconomic theory. In particular, he specialized in duality theory and its applications to consumer and producer theory and applied general equilibrium theory. During this early research period, he introduced the concepts of flexible functional forms and superlative index numbers. Since 1985, he has concentrated on trying to improve economic measurement; i.e., how to improve the measurement of consumer and producer prices and the measurement of real output, real input, capital and productivity. He has participated in the writing of numerous international manuals for statistical agencies on how to better measure price change. He has worked closely with economic statisticians at various international organizations (the UN, OECD, IMF, World Bank, Eurostat, the European Central Bank) and at many national agencies concerned with economic measurement (Statistics Canada, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of Korea, the Office for National Statistics in the UK, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Productivity Commission and the ABS in Australia, the Treasury in New Zealand and Statistics Netherlands). He has also worked on regulatory measurement problems in Australia and New Zealand over the past 20 years.
Fellow of the Econometric Society 1975
Fellow of the Royal Society (Canada) 1982
Jacob Biely Faculty Research Prize University of British Columbia 1995
Distinguished University Scholar University of British Columbia 2002
Killam Prize for 2003 (Canada)
Julius Shishkin Award for Economic Statistics US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005
Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association 2008
Fellow of the Canadian Economics Association 2011
Fraser Institute Addington Prize for Measurement (Canada) 2014
Member of the Ottawa Group, International Working Group on Price Statistics, The United Nations, 1994 - present
Member of the Canberra Group, International Working Group on Capital Statistics, 1997- 2006
'Irving Fisher and Index Number Theory', Journal of History of Economic Thought, Vol. 35, Issue 2, (June 2013), pp. 199-232.
'Reference Technology Sets, Free Disposal Hulls and Productivity Decompositions', (with Kevin J. Fox), Economics Letters 122, (2014), pp. 238-242.
'US TFP Growth and the Contribution of Changes in Export and Import Prices to Real Income Growth', Journal of Productivity Analysis 41, (2014), pp. 19-39.
'Decompositions of Profitability Change using Cost Functions, Journal of Econometrics 183, (2014), pp. 58-66.
'Hedonic Regressions and the Decomposition of a House Price Index into Land and Structure Components', (with Jan de Haan and Rens Hendriks), Econometric Reviews, No. 34(1-20), (2015), pp. 106-126.