Puzzle Nekst 4 2011-2012

The objective of this puzzle is to find the first name and the family name of an economist who is among the most talented in his/her generation. To find out the name of this economist, some steps need to be taken. Firstly, you need to find the family names of a series of economists. Indicated letters in these names form a code that is needed in a later step. Secondly, you need to find the family names of a second series of economists. Based on specific letters of the names of this second series, a key is to be produced. Finally, the combination of the code from the first step with the key found in the second step allows you to find the solution to this puzzle. More specifically, the code can be deciphered by applying the Vigenère-cipher. Success!

Step 1

Find the following letters in the family names of a series of economists.

1)      The third letter of the name of a British economist who is one of the important contributors to the marginal revolution.

2)      The first letter of the name of an economist who demonstrated that in general you cannot aggregate a set of individual preference orderings into a community preference ordering that satisfies a number of properties.

3)      The fourth letter of the name of a well-known economist and columnist who helped to explain why some countries both export and import cars.

4)      The second letter of the name of an economist who developed econometric tools to analyze choices such as whether to travel by car, by bus or by train.

5)      The fourth letter of the name of a Nobel Prize winning economist who was one of the last generalists in the literature. This because of his fundamental contributions to welfare economics, public finance, international economics and consumer theory. Look at your answer in the above question 2 if you want to know the name of his sister-in-law’s brother.

6)      The fourth letter of the name of an American economist who proposed a consistent estimator for the variance-covariance matrix of the OLS estimator in the presence of heteroskedasticity. He died only a couple of weeks ago.

7)      The fifth letter of the name of a Dutch economist who is affiliated with Harvard University and who is well-known for his contributions to the treatment effects literature.

8)      The fourth letter of the name of a French economist who proved (together with the answer in the above question 2) the existence of an equilibrium in a competitive economy.

9)      The second letter of the name of a female economist who coined the term monopsony to characterize a market form in which there is a single buyer and many sellers.

10)   The first letter of the name of a Nobel Prize winning economist who analyzed the market for lemons.

11)   The sixth letter of the economist who proposed a convenient estimation strategy for models with sample selection.

Step 2

Find the following letters in the family names of a series of economists.

1)      The first letter of the name of a British economist who defined the price elasticity of demand. His name is also well-known among guitar playing Jimi Hendrix fans.

2)      The second letter of the name of a Canadian Harvard economist who developed the BLP-model in empirical industrial organization.

3)      The first letter of the name of a British Nobel prize winning economist who analyzed causality in time series models.

4)      The third letter of a Dutch Nobel prize winning economist who has a brother who also won a Nobel Prize.

5)      The third letter of an American economist who proposed a statistical test that can be used to check whether a variable is endogenous by comparing IV estimates with OLS estimates.

6)      The last letter of a British economist whose ideas are experiencing a revival since 2007.

Step 3

Combine the code found in Step 1 with the key found in Step 2 to find the solution to the puzzle by means of the Vigenère-cipher.