Murray C. Kemp

Obituary

In Remembrance of Murray C. Kemp

While Murray C. Kemp had a wide interest in all areas of economic theory, his main area of specialization was international trade theory. As Paul Samuelson pointed out in a 1993 Festschrift, Murray Kemp, along with Ronald Jones, Harry Johnson, John Chipman, and several others, have put trade theory on firm and wide foundations. Indeed, Murray and his co-authors extended the standard Hecksher-Ohlin theory in many directions, such as trade with variable labor supply, with variable returns to scale, trade with natural resources, trade in the presence of labor unions, and so on. He also strengthened the normative theory of trade by investigating conditions for welfare gains under customs unions (Kemp and Wan, 1976), trade gains under increasing returns, and tests for the desirability of government support for infant industries. A most notable work was his completion of Samuelson’s agenda for compensation by using the Arrow-Debreu framework (Kemp and Wan, 1972). Murray Kemp’s graduate level textbook (1964, revised in 1969) developed techniques that became a main workhorse in trade theory. The book arose from his notes when he taught at MIT in 1960-1961.

Kemp’s research was not restricted to pure trade theory. We know from Dornbusch (1988) that his own dissertation was influenced by the analysis of devaluation conducted by Kemp (1970) and Hahn (1959). Together with various co-authors, Murray Kemp also made important contributions to public economics, to natural resource economics, and to growth theory, publishing their research results in journals such as Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the International Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of International Economics, as well as the Handbook of International Economics (Elsevier, Volume 1, 1984).

Murray Kemp was born in Australia in 1926. After completing his MA degree at the University of Melbourne, he became a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University. His supervisor was Evsey Domar. After Johns Hopkins, Kemp joined McGill University as an associate professor in 1951, where he stayed until 1959, with a year off in England, as a Nuffield Fellow. In 1960, he joined the MIT faculty, where he interacted with Samuelson and Solow. After a couple of years at MIT, he returned to Australia as research professor at the University of New South Wales, where he supervised many graduate students and wrote joint papers with several Australia-based academics. In fact, everywhere that Murray went, he ended up having new co-authors. He had more than fifty co-authors and together they wrote more than 500 joint articles, as well as several books. As Samuelson put it, Murray was the Johny Appleseed of the economic profession.

During one of his visits to CES, he wrote a paper with Hans-Werner Sinn on a general equilibrium version of the Siegel Paradox (“A Model of Privately Profitable, but Socially Useless Speculation”, Japanese Economic Review, 2000).

Murray Kemp was a great mentor. He successfully encouraged his Ph.D. students to publish chapters of their dissertation in top international journals, such as Econometrica and the Review of Economic Studies. His students and his co-authors are unanimous that working with him was a great joy. He was a great team player—except in tennis, a non-team sport that he often enticed his co-authors to play with him.

Let us conclude by recalling the words of Paul A. Samuelson, who wrote in his Foreword to the 1993 Festschrift, Trade, Welfare and Economic Policies, in honor of Murray Kemp: ‘To be a recognized scholar it is neither necessary nor sufficient that a person be friendly, generous, humanitarian, or likeable. We who have encountered Murray Kemp in the great game of economic science, therefore, feel singularly blessed that he is so many standard deviations above the mean in these attributes that define character. A scientist earns the only mortality worth having. Of the good scholar we say: Rex numquam moritur.’

Murray C. Kemp passed away on 5 September 2021, in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 95.

Obituary written by Ngo Van Long, Department of Economics, McGill University