James Tobin
James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored endogenous variables, the well-known "Tobit model". Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
Tobin's q
In his 1966 paper "Marginal Productivity and the Macro-Economic Theory of Distribution: Comment on Samuelson and Modigliani" Nicholas Kaldor introduced this relationship as part of his broader theory, co-authored by Luigi Pasinetti, of a macroeconomic theory of distribution that was non-marginalist. This theory is today known as the ‘Cambridge Growth Model’ after the location (University of Cambridge, UK) where the theories was devised. In the paper Kaldor writes: