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
Tobin's q (also known as 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 article "Marginal Productivity and the Macro-Economic Theories of Distribution: Comment on Samuelson and Modigliani". It was popularised a decade later, however, by James Tobin, who describes its two quantities (1977):