Image courtesy of GAMS Development Corporation.
David A. Kendrick (November 14, 1937 - April 7, 2024) helped build computational economics as a field. On May 28 and 29, 2026, his collaborators, students, and colleagues gather at Johns Hopkins to honor his work and continue the conversation he started.
At a glance¶
Dates: Thursday May 28 (afternoon onward) and Friday May 29, 2026
Venue: Hopkins Bloomberg Center, Washington, DC
Format: Invitation-only memorial conference, approximately 25 in-person participants
Student workshop: Half-day computational economics workshop for JHU Advanced Academic Programs students, Thursday morning, separate program from the main conference
Co-hosted by: Society for Computational Economics (SCE) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU)
David Kendrick¶
From his time at MIT and Harvard through his long tenure at the University of Texas at Austin (1970-2014), where he was the Ralph W. Yarborough Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts, Kendrick was the founding editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (1979), co-founded the journal Computational Economics (1988), later was president of the Society for Computational Economics, and co-edited Volume 1 of the Handbook of Computational Economics with Hans Amman and John Rust. With Alexander Meeraus he helped develop the GAMS modeling system into a tool widely used across applied general equilibrium and policy modeling.
His 1981 book Stochastic Control for Economic Models (McGraw-Hill) brought control theory into economic policy analysis and is widely regarded as his seminal work. His textbooks, including Computational Economics (Princeton University Press, with Hans Amman and Ruben Mercado) and Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory (with Peter Dixon and Samuel Bowles), brought numerical methods into graduate economics teaching.
Read more about David Kendrick
Conference structure¶
The working plan splits the two conference days by purpose. Thursday afternoon opens with welcoming remarks, a keynote address, a paper session, and a reception and memorial dinner. Friday morning features a second keynote and a memorial-reflections session that combines in-person personal memories with brief Zoom contributions from invited collaborators who cannot travel. Friday afternoon hosts in-person paper sessions and closing remarks. A separate half-day workshop on computational economics opens Thursday morning for JHU Advanced Academic Programs students.
Research paper presentations are in-person only. The organizers arrange a small number of scheduled Zoom contributions in advance, slotting them into the Friday memorial-reflections session so colleagues who cannot travel can still share tributes and personal remarks.
Organizers¶
Christopher Carroll, Johns Hopkins University
Lilia Maliar, City University of New York
Alan Lujan, Johns Hopkins University
For questions about the conference, please contact the organizers.