Eli Heckscher

Eli Filip Heckscher (1879 to 1952) was a Swedish political economist and economic historian who spent his career at the Stockholm School of Economics. Born in Stockholm, he completed his doctorate at Uppsala University in 1907, where he studied economics under David Davidson, and became professor of political economy and statistics at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1909. He later exchanged that chair for a research professorship in economic history and retired as emeritus professor in 1945. In 1929 he founded the Institute for Economic and Business History Research to build economic history in Sweden as a policy-oriented field. Heckscher is best known for his 1919 article on the effect of foreign trade on the distribution of income, which laid out the model of international trade now called the Heckscher-Ohlin model after his student Bertil Ohlin, and for his book Mercantilism and his multi-volume economic history of Sweden. Early a social conservative who favoured an interventionist state, he became a proponent of economic liberalism during the First World War.