Frank Hahn
| Frank Hahn | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
26 April 1925 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | 29 January 2013 (aged 87) Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Institution | University of Birmingham, Cambridge University, London School of Economics |
| Field | Economics |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics |
| Doctoral advisor |
Nicholas Kaldor Lionel Robbins |
| Contributions | General equilibrium theory, monetarism, monetary theory, Keynesian economics, "Hahn's problem" |
| Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
Frank Horace Hahn FBA (26 April 1925 – 29 January 2013) was a British economist whose work focused on general equilibrium theory, monetary theory, Keynesian economics and monetarism. A famous problem of economic theory, the conditions under which money (which is intrinsically worthless) can have a positive value in a general equilibrium, is called "Hahn's problem" after him.
Frank Hahn was born on 26 April 1925 in Berlin to Czech parents. His father was a chemist by profession and a writer. The family moved to Prague in 1931 and left for England in 1938. He and his brother were educated at Bournemouth School from when he was 13, a school for which he retained an abiding enthusiasm. He became a navigator in the RAF in the Second World War, then resumed his interrupted higher education, not reading Mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford, but instead reading Economics at the London School of Economics. He married Dorothy Salter, also an economist, in 1946, and obtained a lectureship at Birmingham in 1948.
Frank Hahn took his doctoral degree in 1951 at the London School of Economics (LSE) for the thesis The share of wages: an enquiry into the theory of distribution, where he was supervised initially by Nicholas Kaldor and later by Lionel Robbins. As a student, he had been part of the Hayek–Robbins seminar at LSE, and he once said his wife had been an original member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
Hahn began his teaching career in 1948 at the University of Birmingham, where he was subsequently elected Reader in Mathematical Economics. In 1960 he joined the University of Cambridge - as a Fellow of Churchill College and as University Lecturer in economics.
In 1967 he moved to the London School of Economics, where he received his first professorship. He returned to Cambridge as Professor of Economics five years later. His inaugural lecture "On the notion of equilibrium in economics" was delivered on 28 February 1973. He remained Professor of Economics at Cambridge until his retirement in 1992, though he made near-annual visits to the USA, especially as Visiting Professor at Harvard University, the MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as to Stanford's Institute of Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences. From 1990 to 1996 Hahn directed the PhD program of the Economics Department at the University of Siena. He eventually became Emeritus Professor at Cambridge.
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