Jan Kmenta was born in Prague in 1928. After World War II, he studied statistics at the Czech University of Technology, but he fled to Germany in 1949 following the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, and then emigrated to Australia. He earned a Bachelor of Economics degree from the University of Sydney in 1958, and was a Lecturer for two years at the University of New South Wales. He then went to Stanford University, from which he obtained a Ph.D. in 1964. After two years at the University of Wisconsin, he came to Michigan State in 1965, and remained there until 1973, when he moved to the University of Michigan. He was one of the founding fathers of the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (CERGE) in Prague, which was started in 1991. He retired from Michigan in 1993, in large part to be able to spend more time at CERGE, and was a Visiting Professor there until his death in 2016.
Kmenta was an eminent scholar with a worldwide reputation. He was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Econometric Society, and he received the NEURON Award (the highest Czech scientific award) in 2010. He was an associate editor of Journal of the American Statistical Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Metrika. He published extensively in the top economics and econometrics journals, including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, Econometrica, American Economic Review, International Economic Review and Econometric Theory. He held visiting appointments at approximately 10 universities or institutes around the world. He was best known for his work on production function estimation, distributed lag models and simultaneous equations models; for his very influential book Elements of Econometrics (1971), one of the earliest econometrics texts; and for his somewhat controversial methodological views, which argued strongly against the separation of econometrics and economic theory.
Kmenta was an excellent teacher. He turned out a large number of Ph.D. students, many of whom were quite successful professionally, and all of whom were fiercely devoted to him. However, his main contribution to the MSU Economics Department was that he laid the foundation upon which its later excellence in econometrics was built. In the mid-1960s, many economics departments had no resident econometrician, and few had more than one. Shortly after Kmenta was hired, he brought James Ramsey from Wisconsin, thus establishing econometrics as a strength of the department. After he left for Michigan and Ramsey left for NYU, MSU hired Kmenta’s former student Peter Schmidt, and subsequently Richard Baillie, Jeffrey Wooldridge, Tim Vogelsang, Kyoo il Kim and Antonio Galvão, to give it one of the strongest set of senior econometricians anywhere.
