Henri Theil was a Dutch econometrician

Econometrics

Econometrics has been defined as "the application of mathematics and statistical methods to economic data" and described as the branch of economics "that aims to give empirical content to economic relations." More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on...

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He graduated from the University of Amsterdam. He was the successor of Jan Tinbergen

Jan Tinbergen

Jan Tinbergen , was a Dutch economist. He was awarded the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969, which he shared with Ragnar Frisch for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes...

 at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Later he taught in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 and at the University of Florida

University of Florida

The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

. He is most famous for his invention of 2-stage least squares. This estimation technique greatly simplified estimation of simultaneous equation models of the economy and came into widespread use for this purpose. He is also famous for the Theil index

Theil index

The Theil index is a statistic used to measure economic inequality. It has also been used to measure the lack of racial diversity. The basic Theil index TT is the same as redundancy in information theory which is the maximum possible entropy of the data minus the observed entropy. It is a special...

, a measure of entropy

Entropy

Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...

, which belongs to the class of Kolm

Serge-Christophe Kolm

Serge-Christophe Kolm is a French public economist, econometrician, and political philosopher. He has written on economic inequality and justice, public and welfare economics, and on Buddhist economics.-Public and welfare economics:...

-Indices and is used as an inequity indicator in econometrics. He is also responsible for the Theil–Sen estimator

Theil–Sen estimator

In non-parametric statistics, the Theil–Sen estimator, also known as Sen's slope estimator, slope selection, the single median method, or the Kendall robust line-fit method, is a method for robust linear regression that chooses the median slope among all lines through pairs of two-dimensional...

 for robust regression

Robust regression

In robust statistics, robust regression is a form of regression analysis designed to circumvent some limitations of traditional parametric and non-parametric methods. Regression analysis seeks to find the effect of one or more independent variables upon a dependent variable...

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