The Unassuming Economist

A brief remembrance of four economists who passed away in 2011: Anand Chandavarkar, Alan Stockman, David Aschauer and Ioannis Tokatlidis

• Anand Chandarvarkar was an illustrious Indian economist, known for his books on Keynes and on central banking in developing economies. My review of Anand’s book on Keynes gives you a flavor of Anand’s scholarship, but an excellent look back at his work and career can be found in a piece in the Economic & Political Weekly by his friend and noted economist Deena Khatkhate.

• Alan Stockman, one of my professors at Rochester, was a noted international economist and a wonderful teacher of introductory economics. I was one of the army of RAs for Alan’s principles of econ course. An obit and a nice tribute from Maury Obstfeld.

• David Aschauer was a classmate at Rochester. He and I went through the bonding experience of failing our macro qualifying exam together on our first try. He later got me into the Chicago Fed when I got tired of a being in a long-distance marriage and wanted to move from Florida to Chicago to be closer to my wife. The Boston Globe had a nice obit piece on David.

• Ioannis Tokatlidis (“Yannis”) was a colleague in the IMF’s Research Department. He served — with great distinction — several IMF chief economists, including Raghu Rajan (with whom he had co-authored some papers such as this one), Simon Johnson and Olivier Blanchard. Though a fine economist in his own right, Yannis devoted his life to making other people’s research better.