Irving Kravis

Irving B. Kravis (August 30, 1916 - January 3, 1992) was an American economist, best known for his work on international price comparisons, leading to the first version of the Penn World Table.

Early life and education Kravis was born in 1916. He obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania.

Career Military service Kravis served the United States in World War II as a first lieutenant in China with the Flying Tigers, for which he received a Bronze Star.

In 1956, Kravis published a paper describing the non-availability approach, a theory of internationalization that says that countries import goods that are not available, or prohibitively expensive, at home.

In 1968, the International Comparison Program was created at the University of Pennsylvania by Kravis, Alan W. Heston, Robert Summers, and Zoltan Kenessey to house further research on price comparisons. Kravis, Heston, and Summers continued work on price comparisons, leading to a 1975 paper and then the 1978 paper Real GDP Per Capita for More Than One Hundred Countries that would be the first version of the Penn World Table.

Kravis collaborated on further versions of the Penn World Table; the next version, started in 1975, and published in 1982, incorporated the Geary–Khamis dollar for international price comparison.

Awards and honors Kravis received fellowships from the Ford Foundation as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (the Guggenheim Fellowship). He was a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a consultant to OECD. He was posthumously honored as Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Personal life Kravis died on January 3, 1992, after falling ill at the Philadelphia airport on the way to receiving the Distinguished Fellow award of the American Economic Association. He had developed both lymphoma and Parkinson's disease at the time of his death. He was survived by his wife, sister, two sons, two daughters, and six grandchildren.