Edmond Malinvaud

Who is Edmond Malinvaud?

Edmond Malinvaud is a French economist. He was the first president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Trained at the Ecole Polytechnique and at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique in Paris, Malinvaud was, like Gérard Debreu, a student of Maurice Allais. In 1950, Malinvaud left Allais to join the Cowles Commission in the United States. At Cowles, Malinvaud produced work in many directions. His famous article, "Capital Accumulation and the Efficient Allocation of Resources", provided an intertemporal theory of capital for general equilibrium theory and introduced the concept of dynamic efficiency. He became director of the ENSAE, director of the forecast department of French Treasury, director of the INSEE and Professor at the Collège de France.

He also worked on uncertainty theory, notably the theory of "first order certainty equivalence" and the relationship between individual risks and social risks. His 1971 microeconomics textbook and his econometrics textbook, Statistical Methods in Econometrics, have since become classics.