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Distinguished Fellow - 2004

Noted economist, academic and business leader, Andrew F. Brimmer is the Wilmer D. Barrett Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He was born in Newellton, Louisiana, on September 13, 1926. The son of sharecroppers who were driven off the land by boll weevils, Brimmer attended local, racially segregated elementary and high schools. Upon graduation in 1944, he moved to Bremerton, Washington, to join an older sister. During the day, he worked in the navy yard as an electrician’s helper and attended community college at night. In 1945, Brimmer was drafted into the Army, and served until November, 1946. In January, 1947, Brimmer enrolled in the University of Washington, earning a B.A. in economics in 1950, and an M.A. in 1951. Next, he won a Fulbright grant for research in India in 1951-1952, which produced his pioneering study of “Managing Agents” (Quarterly Journal of Economics. 1955), an early contribution to the development of Agency Theory. In 1952, he enrolled in Harvard, earning a Ph.D. in 1957.

During 1955-1958, Brimmer was employed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as an economist. On one assignment, he helped Sudan establish a central bank. During the Kennedy-Johnson administrations (on leave from the University of Pennsylvania), Brimmer served as assistant secretary for economic affairs in the U.S. Department of Commerce. In 1966, President Johnson appointed him to a full 14-year term as a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (He was the first African American Governor.) In 1974, he was appointed to a chair in the Business School of Harvard University, a post he held for 2 years. He then formed his own consulting company, Brimmer & Co., in 1976.

Brimmer was elected to the Washington Academy of Sciences in 1991. Especially cited was his seminal work on the “Containment of Systematic Risks in Capital Markets.” He has served as vice president of the American Economics Association and president of the Eastern Economics Association. He was president of the North American Economics and Finance Association and serves on a number of corporate boards of directors.

Among Brimmer’s publications are books on “Life Insurance Companies in the Capital Market;” “Economic Development: International and African Perspectives;” “International Banking and Domestic Policy Perspectives;” and “Economic Costs of Discrimination.” His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review; Journal of Economic Perspectives; Journal of Finance; Review of Economics and Statistics; North American Journal of Economics and Finance, among others.

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