The American economist Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948) was one of the most prominent contributors to the study of business cycles and was also among those who first recognized the importance of sound empirical research in economics.

Born on Aug. 5, 1874, in Rushville, III., Wesley C. Mitchell was the eldest son of a Civil War veteran. Despite material difficulties, Mitchell completed his college and graduate education at the University of Chicago, receiving his doctorate in 1899. He married Lucy Sprague in 1912. His main activities, research and teaching, were only briefly interrupted, mainly for government service. During one such interlude, in 1914, Mitchell wrote a highly influential monograph, The Making and Using of Index Numbers, for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Analyzing the Business Cycles

Mitchell's major treatise, Business Cycles (1913), represents a pioneering effort to provide an "analytic description" of the pervasive and recurrent but also complex and changing fluctuations that...