David I. Meiselman
| David I. Meiselman | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1924 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | 2014 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
University of Chicago (MA, PhD) Boston University (BA) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Economics |
| Doctoral advisor | Milton Friedman |
David I. Meiselman (1924 - December 3, 2014) was an American economist. Among his contributions to the field of economics are his work on the term structure of interest rates, the foundation today of the implementation of monetary policy by major central banks, and his work with Milton Friedman on the impact of monetary policy on the performance of the economy and inflation.
Meiselman completed his B.A. in Economics at Boston University in 1947, and his MA in Economics in 1951 from the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1961 for his thesis "The Term Structure of Interest Rates" for which he received The Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Series award.
Meiselman's key contributions to economic research include his dissertation, "The Term Structure of Interest Rates" (1962), and his collaborative study with Milton Friedman, "The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897-1958" (1963).
Meiselman's thesis "The Term Structure of Interest Rates" integrated evidence from cash markets and futures markets into a unified theory of how interest rates may behave over time. He documented empirically that the markets are forward looking, and demonstrated the relationship between short-term and long term interest rates, the link being forward short-term rates based on the path of expected short-term interest rates over the maturity of the expected long-term asset. This framework is widely used by analysts in dealing with term structure issues, and is the framework used by central banks in the implementation of their policies aimed at affecting aggregate spending through the level of long-term interest rates.
This contribution was made at a time when economists had come to attach growing importance to the role of expectations and the expectations-formation process to a variety of key types of economic behavior. It was becoming commonplace to view consumption as based on permanent or life-cycle income instead of only current income, unemployment as dependent on inflation expectations, and business investment as dependent on expected path of sales and profits. In the financial realm, share prices were viewed as being based on expected earnings and fixed-income prices as dependent on expectations of short-term interest rates. Translating these concepts into operationally tractable measures required that the expectations formation process be specified. Meiselman articulated this in the term structure realm using an error-learning process.
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