Eugen Slutsky

Evgeny "Eugen" Evgenievich Slutsky (; – 10 March 1948) was Soviet mathematical statistician, economist and political economist. He is primarily known for the Slutsky equation and the Slutsky–Yule effect.

Early life Slutsky studied in the department of physics and mathematics at Kiev University. In 1901, he was expelled from the university and conscripted into the army for participating in student protests. Paul Samuelson noted that until 1936, he had been entirely unaware of Slutsky's 1915 "masterpiece" due to World War I and the paper's Italian language publication. R. G. D. Allen did the most to propagate Slutsky's work on consumer theory in published papers in 1936 and 1950.

Vincent Barnett argues: "A good case can be made for the notion that Slutsky is the most famous of all Russian economists, even more well-known [than] N. D. Kondratiev, L. V. Kantorovich, or Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky. There are eponymous concepts such as the Slutsky equation, the Slutsky diamond, the Slutsky matrix, and the Slutsky-Yule effect, and a journals-literature search conducted on his name for the years 1980-1995 yielded seventy-nine articles directly using some aspect of Slutsky’s work... Moreover, many microeconomics textbooks contain prominent mention of Slutsky’s contribution to the theory of consumer behavior, most notably the Slutsky equation, christened by John Hicks as the ‘Fundamental Equation of Value Theory'. Slutsky’s work is thus an integral part of contemporary mainstream economics and econometrics, a claim that cannot really be made by any other Soviet economist, perhaps even by any other Russian economist." This showed that it was possible for apparently cyclic behaviour to emerge as the result of random shocks to the economy if the latter were modelled using a stable stochastic difference equation with certain technical properties. This opened up a new approach to business cycle theory by hypothesising that the interaction of chance events could generate periodicity when none existed initially.