The Clark Medal is awarded to an economist under the age of 40 who “is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge”,[3] and when the AEA appointed him as a distinguished fellow in 2012, they cited his development of widely used econometric methods across a range of subjects, including supply and demand, time series analysis, production functions, panel analysis, and family demography.
[11] Marc and Mary Ellen Nerlove divorced in the 1970s, then he married Dr. Anke Meyer (born 1955), a German environmental economist who spent 23 years at the World Bank (1991–2014) and collaborated with him on some of his writings during this time.
He then earned a MA in 1955 and a PhD in economics with distinction in 1956 from the Johns Hopkins University (JHU), where his dissertation was supervised by Carl Christ.
Nerlove’s other teachers included Milton Friedman, Theodore Schultz, Ta-Chung Liu, Fritz Machlup, and Jacob Marschak.
[19] In addition, Nerlove consulted for the RAND Corporation (1959–1989), Southern Pacific Company (1961), (US) President's Committee to Appraise Employment and Unemployment Statistics (1962),[20] World Bank (1979–1985), and International Food Policy Research Institute (1981–1986).