Martin Browning named Fellow of the Canadian Economics Association

June 5, 2019

Martin Browning standing against a white backdrop.
Martin Browning was an economics professor at McMaster from 1984 until 1998.

Former McMaster economics professor Martin Browning has been named a Fellow of the Canadian Economics Association.

Browning’s work at McMaster, from 1984 and until his departure 14 years later, changed how economists think about all aspects of behaviour in a household context.

“The research Martin produced while at McMaster was nothing short of groundbreaking,” says Stephen Jones, chair of the Department of economics.

“Current research on the behaviour of households has much of its foundation in the 25 papers Martin published in his time at McMaster.”

Shortly after coming to McMaster, Browning published the classic paper, A Profitable Approach to Labor Supply and Commodity Demands over the Life-Cycle, that altered the way economists view and estimate individual choice in a dynamic setting.

In the early 1990s, Browning focused on the roles of household members’ work patterns on demand systems and worked on models of intertemporal substitution and demand.

In his time at McMaster, Martin won the CEA’s John Rae Prize for research excellence (1996), was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society (1996), and was appointed university professor at McMaster (1997).  He also co-directed the Canadian International Labour Network (1996-1999), and was an editor of the Journal of Human Resources and the Journal of Economic Literature.  He went on to become Professor of Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford, and was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy.

The honour is conferred to recognize the achievements and contribution to the discipline of the most prominent economists who have spent a significant portion of their career in Canada.