Arthur (Archie) Gayer was a rising star in economic research in the United States during the 1930s but his promise was not sustained in later years of his foreshortened life. Born of English parentage at Poona in British India on 19 March 1903, he was educated at St Paul’s School, London, 1916–1921, and Lincoln College, Oxford (BA, 1925; D. Phil., 1930). On arriving in the United States in 1927 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, he did graduate work at Columbia University, where he taught economics at Barnard College from 1931 to 1940. From 1940 until his death on 17 November 1951 as the result of an automobile accident, he taught at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Gayer’s research covered three main subjects: public works in the United States; monetary policy and economic stabilization; and United Kingdom growth and cyclical experience, 1790–1850. He had begun work in 1929 as an assistant to Leo Wolman at the National Bureau of Economic Research on a statistical analysis of the volume, distribution, and fluctuations of local and federal construction expenditures. Gayer’s study, covering the period 1919–1934, was generally regarded as a thorough examination of the empirical record as well as a careful summary of the theory of public works as a stabilizing device. In his study of monetary policy, in which he reviewed the traditional and interwar gold standard, Gayer advocated British-US cooperation in establishing a satisfactory international monetary system over the dollar-sterling area. In honour of Irving Fisher’s seventieth birthday, he edited a volume of essays on the lessons of monetary experience. From 1936 to 1941, Gayer directed a study designed to expand his doctoral thesis, ‘Industrial Fluctuation and Unemployment in England, 1815–1850’. The product of this research, in which he collaborated with a team of young scholars, was published in two volumes after Gayer’s death. Conceptually, the study was heavily influenced by ideas in the General Theory, although the cyclical analysis was based on measures pioneered by the National Bureau. By the time the study appeared, the National Bureau’s method of analysis commanded attention neither in the United States nor in Britain.

Selected Works

  • 1935a. Public works in prosperity and depression. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.

  • 1935b. Economic stabilization: A study of the gold standard. London: A. & C. Black.

  • 1937. The lessons of monetary experience: Essays in honor of irving fisher. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

  • 1953. (With W.W. Rostow and Anna J. Schwartz). The growth and fluctuation of the British economy, 1790–1850, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted, Hassocks: Harvester. 1975.