John Denis Sargan 1924 — 1996

J. D. Sargan was born on August 23, 1924, in Doncaster, Yorkshire, where he spent his childhood. He was Emeritus Professor of Econometrics at the London School of Economics when he died at his home in Theydon Bois, Essex, on Saturday 13 April, 1996. He received his secondary education at Doncaster Grammar School and, at the age of 17, gained a State Scholarship for entrance to St. Johns College, Cambridge, where he took a first in mathematics and was Senior Wrangler. Immediately after his degree, he was drafted into war work as a junior scientific officer attached to the RAF in Haverfordwest, where he provided basic statistical advice on the testing of new weapons systems. Like many of his generation Sargan’s enthusiasm for economics was aroused by Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and he decided to use his knowledge of mathematics and statistics to help tackle some of the pressing economic problems that faced society in the post-war years. Accordingly, in 1946 he returned to Cambridge to do more statistics, particularly time series, and to read economics, taking advantage of regulations that enabled him to complete a BA degree in economics in a year. More detailed biographical information is given in Hendry and Phillips (2003), on which much of the following discussion draws. Starting his professional career as a lecturer in economics at Leeds University in 1948, Sargan went on to become the leading British econometrician of his generation, playing a central role in establishing the technical basis for modern time-series econometric analysis. In a distinguished career spanning more than forty years as a teacher, researcher, and practitioner, particularly during the period that he was Professor of Econometrics at the LSE, Sargan transformed both the role of econometrics in the analysis of macroeconomic time series, and the teaching of econometrics. His influence on British econometrics was profound and continues today in the traditions he established. Much of Sargan’s research in the first decade of his career at Leeds University over 1948-1958 was devoted to economic issues associated with the distribution of wealth, duopoly, production, and growth. His paper (1957a) on the distribution of wealth is recognized to this day as the most general analytic treatment of the determination of the wealth distribution. His work (1958a, 1961a) on the instability of Leontieff’s dynamic input output model also attracted attention, showing that the Leontief model is not well adapted