Shirley Montag Almon (February 6, 1935 – September 29, 1975) was an American economist noted for the Almon Lag.

Early life and education

Almon was born on February 6, 1935, in

Saxonburg, Pennsylvania Saxonburg is a borough in Butler County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area in the western part of the state. It was founded in 1832 by F. Carl Roebling and his younger brother John as a German farming col ...

, the oldest of seven children of Harold and Dorothea Montag. She was educated at

Goucher College Goucher College ( ') is a private liberal arts college in Towson, Maryland. It was chartered in 1885 by a conference in Baltimore led by namesake John F. Goucher and local leaders of the Methodist Episcopal Church.https://archive.org/details/h ...

, Baltimore, and then for her PhD at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

(1964). A core element of her PhD was published in ''

Econometrica ''Econometrica'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal of economics, publishing articles in many areas of economics, especially econometrics. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Econometric Society. The current editor-in-chief is ...

'' (1965) and introduced the now famous technique for estimating

distributed lag In statistics and econometrics, a distributed lag model is a model for time series data in which a regression equation is used to predict current values of a dependent variable based on both the current values of an explanatory variable and the ...

Career

She went on to work at the Women's Bureau, the

National Bureau of Economic Research The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic c ...

, The

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (informally referred to as the San Francisco Fed) is the federal bank for the twelfth district in the United States. The twelfth district is made up of nine western states—Alaska, Arizona, California, ...

, the

Federal Reserve Board The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, commonly known as the Federal Reserve Board, is the main governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is charged with overseeing the Federal Reserve Banks and with helping implement the m ...

and at both Wesley College and

. Her most noted post was her appointment to the staff of the President's

Council of Economic Advisors The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the President of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical resea ...

in 1966.Blaug, Mark (1985) Great Economists Since Keynes, Harvester

Selected publications

* *

Personal life

She married Clopper Almon Jr. on June 14, 1958. She was diagnosed with a

brain tumor A brain tumor occurs when abnormal cells form within the brain. There are two main types of tumors: malignant tumors and benign (non-cancerous) tumors. These can be further classified as primary tumors, which start within the brain, and seconda ...

in December 1967 after four years of various symptoms, and died on September 29, 1975, in

College Park, Maryland College Park is a city in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States, and is approximately four miles (6.4 km) from the northeast border of Washington, D.C. The population was 34,740 at the 2020 United States Census. It is best known ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Almon, Shirley Montag 1935 births 1975 deaths Economists from Pennsylvania American women economists Deaths from brain cancer in the United States People from Butler County, Pennsylvania Goucher College alumni Harvard University alumni 20th-century American economists 20th-century American women scientists 20th-century American scientists Harvard University faculty