Gregory Chow


Gregory Chi-Chong Chow is a Chinese American economist at Princeton University and Xiamen University. The Chow test, commonly used in econometrics to test for structural breaks, was invented by him. He has also been influential in the economic policy of China, including being an adviser for the Economic Planning and Development Council of the Executive Yuan in Taiwan, and being an adviser for the Chinese State Commission for Restructuring the Economic System on economic reform.

Life

Chow grew up in Guangzhou in Guangdong province in South China, one of seven children in a wealthy family, and in Hong Kong, where the family fled after the 1937 Japanese invasion of China. The family moved to Macao after the 1942 Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, then back to Guangzhou at the end of World War II.
Chow spent one year at Lingnan University in Guangzhou, then finished his undergraduate work at Cornell University. He entered graduate study in economics at the University of Chicago in 1951. He did his 1955 dissertation there on the factors that determine the demand for automobiles, and in extending that work he developed the Chow test for determining the stability of regression coefficients across different data samples.
He subsequently was on the faculties of MIT and then Cornell. He then worked at the IBM Thomas Watson Research Center while also advising the government of Taiwan. In 1970 he joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he remains. In 1974 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Chow's wife Paula K. Chow is the co-founder and director of the International Center at Princeton. The couple have two sons who are engineers and a daughter who is a radiologist.

Contributions

In addition to being the creator of the Chow test, Chow has done research on linear and nonlinear simultaneous equation systems, full-information maximum likelihood estimation, estimation with missing observations, estimation of large-scale macroeconometric models, and modeling and forecasting with time series methods. He made major contributions to optimal control theory and its application to stochastic economic systems.
Chow has written extensively on the economies of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, and has served as an advisor to those regions.

Selected publications