1959-- 2003. Tor Jakob Klette was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Industrial. Economics who sadly passed away on August 13th 2003, aged 44. He had ...
THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS Volume LII March 2004
0022-1821 No. 1
TOR JAKOB KLETTE 1959-- 2003 Tor Jakob Klette was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics who sadly passed away on August 13th 2003, aged 44. He had been fighting brain cancer for over a year. He left behind his wife, Ellen Klette and two children, Jon Audun and Nina. Tor started his career in the research department of Statistics Norway, an affiliation that he maintained throughout his life. He later became a professor at the University of Oslo. In both appointments, Tor helped create and nurture a strong group of young Norwegian researchers. He was generous in ideas and insights and will be sorely missed by those who knew him both within and outside the academic community. Tor was a leading figure in applied industrial economics in Europe, although his published work spanned several disciplines including labour economics and econometrics. An enduring theme of his academic life was an intense interest in understanding innovation, a fascination he shared with a mentor, Zvi Griliches. Tor’s first published paper was a theoretical analysis of R&D incentives1, but most of his subsequent work was devoted to mapping theories rigorously onto panels of firms. He paid careful attention to the problems of measuring firm performance and how it was affected by R&D, human capital and other factors in an econometrically robust way2. In his last years he was making significant intellectual progress (together with Griliches and Kortum) in understanding how we could combine the insights from modern growth theory with the stylized empirical facts of the huge heterogeneity in firm-level productivity3. Tor’s home page at the University of Oslo can still be accessed at http:// folk.uio.no/torjk/. One of his favourite quotes gives the flavour of his sense of humour and his attitude towards academic inquiry. We have not succeeded in answering all our problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.’’ [Sitert i Øksendal (1985)] John Van Reenen January, 2004 1 Klette, T.J. and D. de Meza, 1986, ‘Is the Market Biased against Risky R&D?.’ RAND Journal of Economics, spring, p. 133–39. 2 For example, Klette, T.J., 1999, ‘Market Power, Scale Economies and Productivity: Estimates from a Panel of Establishment Data,’ Journal of Industrial Economics, 47, 451–76. 3 Klette, T.J. and Z. Griliches, 2000, ‘Empirical Patterns of Firm Growth and R&D Investment: A Quality Ladder Model Interpretation,’ Economic Journal, 110, 363–387; Klette, T.J. and Samuel Kortum, ‘Innovating Firms and Aggregate Innovation: Evidence and a Theory,’ CEPR Discussion Paper No. 3428.
r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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