Professor Sir David Hendry, Director of Economic Modelling at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by Aarhus University.

Professor Hendry, one of the world’s most influential and respected living econometricians, has collaborated with the university over many years, participating in major conferences, working with its Department of Economics researchers and co-editing books.

Professor Hendry’s work is predominantly concerned with the development of a coherent methodological approach to the econometrics of time series. He is best known for his work on the so-called ‘consumption function’, which calculates the amount of total consumption in an economy. His description of consumption over time demonstrates that changes in consumption from one period to the next are not only dependent on changes in income, but are also dependent on the relationship between consumption and income in the previous period. As economic series progress, they correct the deviations from equilibrium of previous periods.

His research has helped make this approach more widespread and easier to apply, both through publicly-available software packages for applying the method to data and the publication of important empirical case studies.