Wesley Clair Mitchell

Wesley Clair Mitchell
Wesley Clair Mitchell
Born	(1874-08-05)August 5, 1874 Rushville, Illinois, U.S.
Died	October 29, 1948(1948-10-29) (aged 74) New York City, U.S.
Nationality	American
Institution	NBER 1920–45 Columbia University 1913–44 UC Berkeley 1903–12 University of Chicago 1899–1903
Field	Political economics Macroeconomics
School or tradition	Institutional economics
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	J. Laurence Laughlin
Doctoral students	Simon Kuznets Arthur F. Burns Raymond J. Saulnier
Influences	Thorstein Veblen John Dewey
Contributions	Empirical research on Business cycles

Wesley Clair Mitchell (August 5, 1874 – October 29, 1948) was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades.

Mitchell was born in Rushville, Illinois, the second child and oldest son of a Civil War army doctor turned farmer. In a family with seven children and a disabled father with an appetite for business ventures "verging on rashness" a lot of responsibility fell on the oldest son. Despite these challenges, Wesley Clair went to study at the University of Chicago and was awarded a PhD in 1899.

Mitchell's career as a researcher and teacher took the following course: instructor in economics at Chicago (1899–1903), assistant professor (1903–08) and professor (1909–12) of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, visiting lecturer at Harvard University (1908–09), lecturer (1913) and full professor (1914–44) at Columbia University. In 1916 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

He was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research, where he taught for a time between 1919 and 1922, and of the National Bureau of Economic Research (1920), where he was director of research until 1945.

There were interruptions for government service during the First World War and Mitchell served on many government committees; he was chairman of the President's Committee on Social Trends (1929–33). In 1923–4 he was president of the American Economic Association. From 1941 he was on the original standing committee of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.