Nobel-winning economist Clive Granger dies at 74

SAN DIEGO — Economist Clive W.J. Granger, who shared a Nobel Prize for work that changed how analysts look at financial data, has died in San Diego. He was 74.

Granger died Wednesday, according to a news release from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a professor emeritus. The university did not disclose a cause of death.

Granger and his San Diego colleague Robert Engle won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 2003. They showed how the relationships between different economic measurements, such as money supply and national income, change over time.

Those insights helped analysts improve their predictions of future economic performance. In awarding the Nobel, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their methods “have become indispensable tools not only for researchers, but for analysts on financial markets.”

Harvard economist James H. Stock put it more bluntly, telling the Los Angeles Times that “Granger gave us a rigorous way to distinguish between stupid and non-stupid relationships.”

Granger said he had a hard time believing the call telling him he had won the Nobel Prize was not a hoax. And it was not easy, he added, to live up to the reputation that came with it.

“People expect me to say brilliant things all the time,” he said.

Granger was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1934. He earned his bachelor’s in mathematics and doctorate in statistics from the University of Nottingham, England, where he also taught.

He came to UC San Diego in 1974, working with Engle in the Department of Economics. Granger retired to professor emeritus status in 2003, just a few months before winning the Nobel Prize.