Howrey and his wife Sharon admire framed photos of the old Economics Building and Lorch Hall, the two places where Economics was housed on campus during Howrey's 32 year career with the Department. They gift was presented at the joint retirement party for Howrey and Saul Hymans help in Foster Library, 2004.

Professor of economics was killed in a bicycle accident on Friday, June 17, 2011 in Boulder, CO. He was 73.

Howrey graduated from Drake University in 1959 and received his PhD in economics in 1964 at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Ann Arbor.

At the time of his retirement in 2005, Professor Howrey had been a member of the U-M faculty since 1973, during which time he established a long record of distinguished contributions to macroeconometrics and time series analysis. As an active member of the national Model Comparison Seminar he was deeply involved in cooperative research with members of modeling groups at numerous centers of economic modeling activity in the U.S.

As a senior faculty member in the Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics (RSQE), Howrey produced a number of publications dealing with the reliability of macroeconomic data, the accuracy of economic forecasts, and the theory underlying the techniques used in economic forecasting.

His research focused on the proper use of economic models and data to increase understanding of economic behavior, an early example of which is the well-known 1974 paper, “Notes on Testing the Predictive Performance of Econometric Models” co-authored with Nobel Prize recipient Lawrence Klein and the late Mike McCarthy.

In 1978, Howrey published “The Use of Preliminary Data in Econometric Forecasting,” a seminal contribution to what became a critically important strand in the literature of economic measurement. That same year saw the publication of “The Measurement and Determination of Loanable Funds Saving,” in which Howrey and his colleague Saul Hymans investigated the important, if controversial, issue of the impact of the rate of interest on personal saving. His work in this area continued in the 1990s when He and his student Michael Donihue wrote “Using Mixed Frequency Data to Improve Macroeconomic Forecasts of Inventory Investment,” and in 2001 when Howrey brought his considerable skills to bear on evaluating “The Predictive Power of the Index of Consumer Sentiment.”

E. Philip Howrey Obituary