Marc Nerlove is truly outstanding agricultural economists who has helped guide the progress of the profession over the last 35 years. His research on agricultural supply response, developing what is now widely known as the "Nerlovian Model," earned him both the Outstanding Dissertation Award, and Best Journal Article Award from the American Farm Economic Association in 1957. His 1958 USDA report "Distributed Lags and Demand Analysis for Agriculture and Other Commodities" won the Outstanding Published Research Report Award from the American Farm Economic Association in 1959, as well as the Publication of Enduring Quality Award from the American Agricultural Economics Association in 1979. His paper (with F.V. Waugh) on the effects of advertising also earned the Best Journal Article Award from the American Farm Economic Association in 1962. His numerous contributions reflect his life-long commitment to develop and use dynamic models of economic behavior on realistic specifications of learning, information use and expectation formation.

Nerlove's early work on lags in adjustments and in expectation formation was extremely influential. His adaptive model and partial adjustment model helped shape much of the empirical analysis of dynamic agricultural supply response over the last decades. An assessment of Nerlove's impact on farm supply analysis is provided by Askari and Cummings in their 1977 article: "Estimating Agricultural Supply Response With The Nerlove Model: A Survey," in the International Economics Review. This article survey's 190 publications making use of the Nerlove model, reporting 600 estimated supply elasticities covering 75 agricultural commodities in almost every region of the globe. Few agricultural economists can claim to have had such decisive influence on the analysis of farm behavior.

Nerlove was a pioneer and an innovator in many areas. An excellent illustration is his 1961 research on "Returns to Scale." This superb example of what Nerlove does best: exploit the interplay between theory and empirical observations. Ernst Berndt(in his book "Theory and Practice of Econometrics" Addison-Wesley 1991) identifies Nerlove's 1961 paper on "Returns to Scale" as the first empirical application of duality of production and cost. This is quite significant, given the important role that duality theory has come to play in empirical economic analysis over the last 15 years.

Another area that Nerlove pioneered was the use of spectral (frequency domain) methods to study seasonality. Motivated in part by the existence of seasonality in agricultural markets, Nerlove's 1964 paper was the first Econometrica paper using frequency domain methods. It contributed to the subsequent developments leading to the incorporation of these methods in the econometric tool kit.

Nerlove has also left his mark on the econometrics of pooled time-series cross-section analysis. His article with Balestra (Econometrica 1966) was a seminal paper on this subject. Again, Nerlove became motivated to work on it after being exposed to a long tradition of cross-section data analysis in farm management. This led him to formulate the variance component model, which is now standard in the econometric analysis of panel-data. It appears safe to say that Nerlove and Balestra were the first to show the crucial difference made by an explicit modeling of the disturbance in the estimation of dynamic relationships using panel data.

In addition, as evidenced by his publication record, Nerlove has made significant contributions to econometrics, time-series analysis, the economics of advertising, economic development, along with areas such as endogenous fertility, economic growth, and female labor supply. He continues to work on the issues of agricultural reforms in developing countries. His demonstrated excellence in so many fields is a clear indication of an extremely creative mind and outstanding scholarship.

Nerlove's contribution to agricultural economics has been large and significant. He has influenced a whole generation of agricultural economists who benefited greatly from his analytical insights and his commitment to applied work. Few individuals can claim to have marked the profession the way he did.