Kenneth D. West
Kenneth David West is the John D. MacArthur and Ragnar Frisch Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and has previously served as co-editor of the American Economic Review. He has published widely in the fields of macroeconomics, finance, international economics and econometrics. Among his honors are the John M. Stauffer National Fellowship in Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and Abe Fellowship. He has been a research associate at the NBER since 1985.
West received a B.A. Economics and Mathematics from Wesleyan University in 1973 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. He taught at Princeton University from 1983 to 1988 before joining the University of Wisconsin in 1988. He has held Visiting Scholar positions at several central banks and at several branches of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. He has published widely in the fields of macroeconomics, finance, international economics and econometrics. Administrative positions include two terms as Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
| Academic Positions | Years Active |
| Princeton University | |
| Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs | 1983-1988 |
| University of Wisconsin | |
| Associate Professor of Economics | 1988-1990 |
| Director, Social Systems Research Institute | 1991-1994 |
| Professor of Economics | 1990-present |
| Ragnar Fischer Professor of Economics | 1998-present |
| Department Chair | 1999-2001, 2005-2008 |
| John D. MacArthur Professor | 2008-present |
He is best known for developing, with Whitney K. Newey, the Newey–West estimator, which robustly estimates the covariance matrix of a regression model when errors are heteroskedastic and autocorrelated.
| Honors | Year |
| National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow | 1980-1983 |
| John M. Stauffer National Fellowship in Public Policy, Hoover Institution | 1985-1986 |
| Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow | 1989-1991 |
| H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, University of Wisconsin | 1991 |
| Fellow, Economics Society | 1993 |
| Mid-Career Faculty Fellowship, University of Wisconsin | 1995 |
| WARF/University Houses Professorship, University of Wisconsin | 1998 |
| Listed in Who's Who in Economics, 4th edition, M. Blaug, Edward Elgar Publishing | 2003 |
| Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics | 2007 |
| Vilas Associate, University of Wisconsin | 2008-2010 |
| John D. MacArthur Professor, University of Wisconsin | 2008 |
| Distinguished Honors Faculty Award, University of Wisconsin | 2010 |
| Wim Duisenberg Research Fellowship, European Central Bank | 2010, 2016 |
| Founding Fellow, International Association for Applied Econometrics | 2018 |