Irving Kravis

Irving B. Kravis (1917 – January 3, 1992) was an American economist, best known for his work on international price comparisons, leading to the first version of the Penn World Table.

Kravis died on January 3, 1992, after falling ill at the Philadelphia airport on the way to receiving the Distinguished Fellow award of the American Economic Association. He was suffering from both lymphoma and Parkinson's disease at the time of his death. He was survived by his wife, sister, two sons, two daughters, and six grandchildren.

Kravis collaborated on further versions of the Penn World Table; the next version, started in 1975, and published in 1982, incorporated the Geary–Khamis dollar for international price comparison. This was called "Phase III" of the ICP and the 1982 paper provided a definitive account of the standard procedures of the ICP.

In 1968, the International Comparison Program was created at the University of Pennsylvania by Kravis, Alan W. Heston, Robert Summers, and Zoltan Kenessey to house further research on price comparisons. Kravis, Heston, and Summers continued work on price comparisons, leading to a 1975 paper and then the 1978 paper Real GDP Per Capita for More Than One Hundred Countries that would be the first version of the Penn World Table.

In 1956, Kravis published a paper describing the non-availability approach, a theory of internationalization that says that countries import goods that are not available, or prohibitively expensive, at home.

After the war, Kravis returned to the University of Pennsylvania to become a faculty member. He served as chairman of the economics department from 1955 to 1958 and again from 1962 to 1967. He also served as associate dean of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce (the business school of the University of Pennsylvania) from 1958 to 1960. In total, he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania for 37 years.

In the 1950s, during a visit to Paris, Kravis worked with Milton Gilbert, an economist at the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) (the predecessor to OECD) on international price comparison. This led to An International Comparison of National Products and the Purchasing Power of Currencies, published 1954, a pioneering work on international comparison of production and purchasing power.

Kravis was born in 1917. He obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he was a student of Simon Kuznets, whose interest in national income accounting was influential to Kravis's areas of research. Kravis would also follow Kuznets in associating with the National Bureau of Economic Research.