Otto Eckstein

Otto Eckstein (August 1, 1927 – March 22, 1984) was a German-American economist. He was a key developer and proponent of the theory of core inflation (Eckstein 1981), which proposed that in determining accurate metrics of long run inflation, the transitory price changes of items subject to volatile pricing, such as food and energy, are to be excluded from computation.

Eckstein was born in Germany in 1927 to a Jewish business family. In 1938, when he was 11 years old, he and several other family members fled the Nazi regime, first emigrating to England, and then, a year later, coming to the United States, where he made his permanent home. He held an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University and became a Harvard University economics professor, an economic consultant to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1964 to 1966. In 1969, he and Donald Marron co-founded Data Resources Inc., the largest non-governmental distributor of economic data in the world, which built and maintained the largest macroeconometric model of the era. In 1975 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 1979 he sold DRI for over $100 million to McGraw Hill.

Eckstein was married and had three children. He died of cancer in 1984, at the age of 56.