INTRODUCTION TO THE DISTRIBUTION OF EARNINGS AND OF INDIVIDUAL OUTPUT, BY A.D. ROY

摘要

A.D. Roy (28 June 1920-12 March 2003) had a brief but illustrious career as an academic economist (see Sullivan, 2011 for a biography). A Cambridge-educated economist who won the distinguished Tripos award in 1939 in mathematics, he served with the British Army in India and fought in the Battle of Imphal which stemmed the Japanese invasion of India in 1944. After the war, he returned to Cambridge to study economics and history and was awarded a second Tripos award in economics in 1948. Roy was appointed Faculty Assistant Lecturer in Statistics at Cambridge University in 1949. He completed his Master of Arts in Economics at Cambridge in 1950, reading under Professor Edward Austin Gossage Robinson, who served as editor of this Journal. In the same year, he was appointed Director of Economic Studies at Cambridge and then University Lecturer in Economics and Politics at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1951. While at Cambridge, Roy wrote the 1950 paper republished here as well as his better known 1951 Oxford Economic Papers article. In addition to the 1950 and 1951 papers reviewed here, Roy made a key contribution to portfolio theory in his paper 'Safety First and the Holding of Assets' (1952).