Yair Mundlak is a leading scholar, educator, and researcher in the field.

Following his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where his thesis was one of the first applications of decision theoretic framework to forecasting, he joined the Hebrew University, where he was the first full-time staff member in the department of Agricultural Economics. Under his initiative and leadership the Department soon became one of the leading departments of agricultural economics. He also built the Center for Agricultural Economics Research, which has served as the research arm of the Department, and has hosted pioneering research in a number of important subjects.

Since his first major empirical study, which was the analysis of family farms in Israel, he has continued to move the discipline of agricultural economics forward. In this research, he identified at least two topics that are now well recognized. The first was the importance of the managerial or entrepreneurship factor in production and its incorporation in the empirical analysis of production functions. This eliminated the management bias and led to a general discussion of the fixed and random effects in the econometric literature. The second was the examination of the behavior of farmers in their response to market prices. This work underlined the importance of the recursive nature of production in the study of supply and was later developed into articles proposing an alternative to the reduced form distributed lag analysis. This framework has been applied in his work on the aggregate supply and used widely to interpret the meaning of supply elasticities. This work also branched off to analyze the importance of aggregation over time in dynamic models, a subject that has recently gained prominence in the literature.

Mundlak's work on production functions has been developed in number of directions. Recently, this work has led to the development of the choice techniques approach for estimating production functions, evaluating technical change, and measuring productivity.

His second early major empirical study in Israel was of long run forecasts of supply and demand for Israel agriculture. The forecasts led to the examination of the process of agricultural growth, which was later developed in his analytic work, in his teachings at the University of Chicago and in the empirical applications made in his work at IFPRI. The essence of the work is the formulation of the dynamics of the intersectoral allocation of resources, endogenous technology and the mapping of general policies into sectoral incentives in order to evaluate the consequences of policy measures. This work was done with colleagues in Japan, Argentina, Chile, and the Punjab. The work on Argentina, first published in 1979, showed clearly that macro and trade policies that may appear to have neutral effects on the various sectors of the economy can have a strong effect on agriculture that often exceeds the effect of the direct measures toward the sector. This work has also been developed to deal with economics growth in the intermediate run, emphasizing the importance of physical capital in the process of growth, among other things.

Mundlak has published widely and his research is often cited. This also resulted in awards in Israel, including the Rothschild Prize, and by the AAEA. Mundlak has been very effective teacher. His view of agricultural economics -- that it is economics applied to agriculture -- has not only guided his own research but has also been the foundation of the curriculum at the Hebrew University. His former students in Israel and abroad serve in leading universities and in government.