Hotelling, Harold

Hotelling, Harold

(1895–1973) economist; born in Fulda, Minn. He was a pioneering economic and statistical theorist who taught at Stanford (1924–31) and Columbia University (1931–46) before establishing a department of mathematical statistics at the University of North Carolina in 1946. His reputation was based on relatively few published articles, but they launched many ideas regarding the economics of location and the "new" welfare economics. His paper, "The Economics of Exhaustible Resources," (Journal of Political Economy, April 1931) was "rediscovered" after the oil crisis of 1973.