About David Kendrick

David A. Kendrick (November 14, 1937 - April 7, 2024) was one of the founding figures of computational economics.

Early life and education¶

Born in Gatesville, Texas, Kendrick spent his early career assisting Texas Congressman W. R. Poage and briefly considered politics before turning to economics. He earned his BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1960 and his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1966, supervised by Richard S. Eckaus. His doctoral research applied linear and mixed-integer programming to investment planning in the Brazilian steel industry; the computational limits of the time (a model with twenty-three integer variables, forced to stop without confirmed optimality) foreshadowed the computational economics agenda he later helped define.

Career¶

Kendrick was Assistant Professor at Harvard from 1966 to 1970, contributing to Hollis Chenery’s program of quantitative development economics. In 1970 he returned to the University of Texas at Austin as the Ralph W. Yarborough Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts, where he remained for the rest of his career. He retired in 2014, and UT Austin granted him emeritus status in 2016. Across his late career and retirement he also held a long-running part-time consulting role at the World Bank, continuing the applied-modeling tradition he had helped shape. He passed away in Austin on April 7, 2024, at the age of 86.

Research¶

Kendrick’s research helped define computational economics as a distinct sub-discipline:

• Stochastic optimal control in economics. His 1981 book Stochastic Control for Economic Models (McGraw-Hill) brought modern control theory into economic policy analysis and is widely regarded as his seminal work. He continued the program with Feedback: A New Framework for Macroeconomic Policy (Kluwer, 1988) and decades of articles, many co-authored with Hans Amman, on dual control, learning, and adaptive optimization.

• Computational pedagogy. Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory (with Peter Dixon and Samuel Bowles, North-Holland, 1980) and the later Computational Economics (Princeton University Press, with P. R. Mercado and Hans Amman, 2006) taught generations of students how to combine numerical methods with economic theory.

GAMS¶

The General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS), co-developed with Alexander Meeraus, Anthony Brooke, Johannes Bisschop, and others, was central to Kendrick’s applied work. Meeraus credited Kendrick’s networking with computer scientists at UT Austin with enabling the first GAMS compiler. From the mid-1980s, Kendrick made GAMS available to UT Austin students on the mainframe and on floppy disks for personal computers, decades before such tools were routine in graduate teaching. His 1984 book The Planning of Investment Programs in the Steel Industry (with Meeraus and J. Alatorre, Johns Hopkins University Press) contains what may be the first published application of a computable general equilibrium model in GAMS, a miniature ORANI model that Peter Dixon shared with him. The first edition of GAMS: A User’s Guide (Brooke, Meeraus, and Kendrick, 1988) became the canonical reference.

Selected books¶

• Programming Investment in the Process Industries (MIT Press, 1967)

• Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory (with Samuel Bowles, Markham, 1970; with Peter Dixon and Samuel Bowles, North-Holland, 1980)

• Frontiers in Quantitative Economics, Volume II, edited with M. Intriligator (North-Holland, 1974)

• The Planning of Industrial Programs: A Methodology, with A. Stoutjesdijk (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)

• Stochastic Control for Economic Models (McGraw-Hill, 1981)

• The Planning of Investment Programs in the Steel Industry, with A. Meeraus and J. Alatorre (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)

• Feedback: A New Framework for Macroeconomic Policy (Kluwer, 1988)

• GAMS: A User’s Guide, with Anthony Brooke and Alexander Meeraus (1988; revised editions through 1992 and later)

• Handbook of Computational Economics, edited with Hans Amman and John Rust (North-Holland, 1996)

• Computational Economics, with P. R. Mercado and Hans Amman (Princeton University Press, 2006)

Editorial and institutional service¶

Kendrick was the founding editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (JEDC), establishing the journal’s standing across economics and engineering. In 2002 the JEDC published a special issue honoring his work. He co-founded the journal Computational Economics in 1988 and later was president of the Society for Computational Economics. He co-edited Volume 1 of the Handbook of Computational Economics (North-Holland, 1996) with Hans Amman and John Rust.

Students and collaborators¶

Kendrick advised PhD students whose work spanned the applied-modeling agenda he taught: P. Manouchehri Adib (1985, petrochemical investment planning), David Letson (1992, water quality management; now at the University of Miami), Gary Linden (1992, energy investment in Colombia), and Hans Lofgren (1993, Egyptian agricultural sector; later developer of the World Bank’s MAMS model). His long-term collaborators and editorial partners include Hans Amman (most frequent co-author; founding Editor-in-Chief of Computational Economics), P. Ruben Mercado (co-author of Computational Economics), Alexander Meeraus (GAMS co-developer), Berc Rustem (former JEDC Editor-in-Chief, 1987-2002), Lance Taylor (his student at Harvard, later a CGE pioneer), Peter Dixon and Samuel Bowles (microeconomics textbook co-authors), and John Rust (co-editor of the Handbook of Computational Economics).

Recognition¶

The Society for Computational Economics established the David A. Kendrick Distinguished Service Award to recognize individuals who stand out for their contributions to computational economics and finance, presented on an irregular basis. Kendrick himself received the inaugural award at the Royal Society in London in July 2010.

The University of Texas at Austin has established the David Kendrick Excellence Fund to support graduate students in the Department of Economics.

Character and teaching¶

Beyond his research, colleagues and students remember Kendrick for his warmth, humor, and generosity. He opened his home to visiting scholars and students, and was devoted to his wife Gail, his children Ann and Colin, and his grandchildren, to whom he was “Grandy”. As a teacher he inspired generations of students to pursue computational and applied economics with the same care he brought to his own work. The GAMS Development tribute describes him as a scholar “not driven by professional fads but by a desire to enhance and communicate research and tools in areas that he found promising.”

Memorials and tributes¶

This page draws on three published tributes to David Kendrick:

• Hans Amman, P. Ruben Mercado, and Berc Rustem, “In Memoriam David A. Kendrick (1937-2024): Co-founder of the Journal Computational Economics”, Computational Economics 63 (2024), 1697-1704. Springer Link; Amman et al. (2024).

• “In Memoriam David A. Kendrick (1937-2024)” at the Society for Computational Economics.

• “Remembering David Kendrick (1937-2024)” at GAMS Development.