Jan Kmenta (January 3, 1928 – July 24, 2016) was a Czech-American economist. He was the Professor Emeritus of Economics and Statistics at the University of Michigan and Visiting Professor at CERGE-EI in Prague, until summer 2016. Academic positions and awards After earning his PhD in Economics with a minor in Statistics from Stanford under Kenneth Arrow in 1964, Kmenta held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin 1964–65, Michigan State University 1965–73, and the University of Michigan 1973-93 (emeritus 1993-2016) and was a visiting faculty member at universities in five countries. Kmenta received 24 academic honors, awards, and prizes during his career, beginning with being made a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1970 and a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1980, and stretching through 2010 when he received the NEURON Award for Lifetime Achievement in Economics. Econometric work Kmenta wrote extensively on econometric model building as well as econometric methods. He edited two books with James B. Ramsey: Evaluation of Econometric Models and Large Scale Macro-Econometric Models: Theory and Practice and is the author of at least 34 published econometrics papers. A wide-ranging econometrician, his papers analyze topics as disparate as small sample properties of estimators, missing observations, estimation of production function parameters, and ridge regression among many others. Much of his published research is focused on econometric issues that are relevant in areas far beyond economics. As a result, his work is referenced in publications in medicine, political science, insurance underwriting, antitrust litigation, and energy issues, to list but a few. For example, the early (1966) "Specification and Estimation of Cobb-Douglas Production Function Models" with Arnold Zellner and Jacques Drèze has been cited by research as different as family involvement effects on firm productivity and devising fishing gears with reduced environmental effects. Kmenta's "General Procedure for Obtaining Maximum Likelihood Estimates in Generalized Regression Models" (with W. Oberhofer) formally established conditions for validity of the iterative estimation method most widely used in econometrics today, while his simplified estimation of the constant elasticity of substitution constant elasticity of substitution production function both gave "the nascent field of industrial organization a new set of powerful tools for studying firm efficiency" and has been used to analyze the cost of network infrastructure, among many other applications. Kmenta has made multiple other contributions incorporated into the core of econometrics. Elements of Econometrics Jan Kmenta is best known to the general