Holbrook Working (February 5, 1895 – October 5, 1985) was an American professor of
economics
Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...
and
statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...
at
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
's Food Research Institute known for his contributions on
hedging, on the theory of
futures prices, on an early theory of
market maker
A market maker or liquidity provider is a company or an individual that quotes both a buy and a sell price in a tradable asset held in inventory, hoping to make a profit on the difference, which is called the ''bid–ask spread'' or ''turn.'' Thi ...
behavior, and on the
theory of storage (including the ''Working curve'' which plots the difference between short term and long term grain futures prices against current inventory).
Biography
He was born in
Fort Collins, Colorado, on February 5, 1895.
Working earned his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1921. He taught at
Cornell University and the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...
before he joined Stanford's Food Research Institute in 1925. His younger brother
Elmer Working made a major contribution on the
identification problem for demand curves in econometrics, with which Holbrook Working was also involved.
Working disagreed with
Keynes's
backwardation theory of futures prices, which argued that short hedgers (farmers) drive down futures prices because of their demand for ''price insurance''. Working argued that there could be hedgers on both sides of the market and that hedging was essentially not a risk reduction technique, but "speculation in the basis" which allows informed traders and commodity dealers to profit from their knowledge of future changes in the difference between futures and spot prices.
He was a founding member of the
Econometric Society and was elected a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association, the
American Statistical Association, and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Stanford Historical Society
accessed 4/24/07. In 1981 he was awarded the Wilks Memorial Award by the American Statistical Association.
He died on October 5, 1985, in Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Clare of Assisi, Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities and towns i ...
.
See also
* Working–Hotelling procedure
Notable papers
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Working, Holbrook
1895 births
1985 deaths
20th-century American economists
Cornell University faculty
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Stanford University faculty
Fellows of the Econometric Society