Tinbergen

Tinbergen is a Dutch surname associated with notable scientists in different fields. It is most often linked to two Dutch Nobel laureates, Jan Tinbergen and Niko Tinbergen. The name is also used for the Tinbergen Institute, a Dutch research center in economics and econometrics named in honor of Jan Tinbergen.

Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) was a Dutch economist who, with Ragnar Frisch, shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969 for the development and application of econometric methods. He helped establish econometrics as a formal field and contributed to the use of dynamic models to analyze economic policy. He served as a professor at the Netherlands School of Economics (now Erasmus University Rotterdam) and advised government planning efforts in the postwar period. His policy-oriented work is associated with early macroeconomic modeling and the practical use of quantitative analysis to inform policy decisions. The Tinbergen Rule, a principle advising that the number of independent policy instruments should be at least equal to the number of targets, is attributed to his approach to policy design.

Niko Tinbergen (1907–1988) was a Dutch-British ethologist and a foundational figure in ethology, the study of animal behavior. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch for discoveries in animal behavior and its adaptive significance. Tinbergen is known for the Four Questions framework for explaining behavior, addressing mechanism, development, function, and evolution, and for extensive field studies on birds and other animals that helped establish observational and experimental methods in ethology.

Tinbergen Institute is a Dutch research institution for economics, econometrics, and finance, named in honor of Jan Tinbergen. It is a collaborative venture among several Dutch universities to promote graduate training and disseminate research in the field.