Zvi Griliches

Who was Zvi Griliches?

Hirsh Zvi Griliches was an economist at Harvard University. He was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in an assimilated Jewish family that spoke Russian at home. During World War II he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp. In 1947 he emigrated to Palestine, where he served in the pre-state Israeli army, learned Hebrew, passed high school equivalence exam, and studied for a year at Hebrew University. He then moved to the United States, where he earned a B.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and then a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Chicago.

The works by Zvi Griliches mostly concerned the economics of technological change, including empirical studies of diffusion of innovations and the role of R & D, patents, and education.

In his classic 1957 Ph.D. dissertation, Hybrid Corn: An Exploration in the Economics of Technological Change, published as an article in the October 1957 issue of Econometrica, Griliches demonstrated that the penetration of corn seeds followed the logistic curve. It was found later through multiple examples by Edwin Mansfield and other researchers that this is a general rule for technological change / diffusion of innovations. The dissertation was one of the first scientific works that treated the development of new technology as an economic phenomenon. Previously, economists had treated it as exogenous.