Profile | Major Works | Resources |
German economist and statistician, member of the "Young" German Historical School.
Ernst Louis Étienne Laspeyres was born in Halle, the son of a
prominent Prussian jurist, descended from French Huguenot emigrants, who
fled to Germany in the 17th Century. From 1853, Étienne Laspeyres
studied law and cameralistics at a series of German
universities - Tübingen, Berlin, Göttingen, Halle and Heidelberg. He
obtained his doctorate in law from Halle in 1857. Laspeyres obtained his
Ph.D. from Heidelberg under Wilhelm Roscher.
That same year, he submitted his habilitation thesis on wage and
population growth, and was appointed lecturer (privat-dozent) at
Heidelberg.
Laspeyres's 1863 study on 17th C. Dutch economic thought was
well-received, and earned him a call to the University of Amsterdam, but
he turned it down. Instead, in 1864, he took up a position as ordinary
(full) professor of political science (Staatswissenschaft) at the
University of Basel (Switzerland). But he did not stay put. He moved to
the Baltics to take up a position at Riga Polytechnic (Russian Latvia)
in 1866, and then took up a chair in statistics at the German-speaking
University of Dorpat (Russian Estonia) in 1869.
Laspeyres returned to Germany in 1873, to take up a position at the
Karlsruhe Polytechnic in Baden. But the very next year (1874),
Laspeyres became professor at the University of Giessen (in Hesse-Darmstadt),
a chair he would retain until his retirement in1900. Laspeyres
served simultaneously on the Hessian state statistics bureau from 1874.
Laspeyres is best known for the Laspeyres price index, which he presented in 1864 and final form in 1871.
Major Works of Étienne Laspeyres
|
HET
|
Resources on Etienne Laspeyres
|
All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca