Mars Cramer

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Mars Cramer (Jan Salomon Cramer) was a Dutch economist and professor of statistics and econometrics at the University of Amsterdam. Born in The Hague on 28 April 1928, he was the son of biologist P. J. S. Cramer. He earned his PhD in Mathematics in 1961 at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on consumer durables and savings, supervised by Pieter de Wolff. In the 1950s he worked for the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.

In 1961 he was appointed Professor of Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam, a newly created chair. He later served as Director of SEO Economic Research from 1985 to 1992. His doctoral students included Arnold Merkies, Geert Ridder, and Mirjam van Praag. In 1980 he was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a Fellow of the Tinbergen Institute.

Cramer was known for his originality and wit, and for a broad, curious approach to research—he even studied the velocity of coins. As a student he edited the literary periodical Propria Cures and wrote short stories and opinion pieces. In 2012 the Washington Post published his moving account of his wife Til’s euthanasia four years earlier. He continued to supervise students and pursue new research until his final days, publishing numerous books and articles in econometrics. He died on 15 March 2014 in Amsterdam.