William C. "Bill" Brainard (born 1935) is an American economist. He is the Arthur Okun Professor Emeritus of Economics at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

, and he served as the provost of the university from 1981 to 1986. Brainard is the namesake of the William C. Brainard chair, which current Yale provost Ben Polak holds. Brainard earned both his economics M.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1963) at Yale. He has been teaching at Yale since 1962. Along with his frequent collaborator

James Tobin James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He d ...

, Brainard developed the theory of

Tobin's q Tobin's q (or the q ratio, and Kaldor's v), is the ratio between a physical asset's market value and its replacement value. It was first introduced by Nicholas Kaldor in 1966 in his paper: ''Marginal Productivity and the Macro-Economic Theories ...

. The concept first appeared in Brainard and Tobin's 1968 article "Pitfalls in Financial Model Building" The letter "Q," however, was not introduced until Tobin's 1969 article "A general equilibrium approach to monetary theory." So, while references to "Q theory" generally carry only Tobin's name, Brainard and Tobin jointly introduced the concept. Brainard was co-editor with George Perry of the ''

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity The ''Brookings Papers on Economic Activity'' (''BPEA'') is a journal of macroeconomics published twice a year by the Brookings Institution Press.[1/nowiki>">">[1/nowiki>/sup> Each issue of the journal comprises the proceedings of a conference he ...

'' from 1980 through 2007, and continues to serve on its advisory panel. Brainard's fields of interest are: Microeconomics, microeconomics and macroeconomic theory, monetary theory and policy, market valuation of firms, and models of financial markets.

References

External links

Homepage of William C. Brainard
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brainard, William C. 1930s births Living people 20th-century American economists 21st-century American economists Yale University alumni Yale University faculty Fellows of the Econometric Society Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association