Michael James Farrell

He was the son of Richard J. Farrell, OBE, an engineer for the Crown Agents for Overseas Governments and Administrations, and Margaret E. Deane.

[2][3] From 1951 to 1953, he was a Commonwealth Fund fellow, and spent two years with the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, in Chicago.

In addition to The Measurement of Production Efficiency, his papers include a pamphlet “Fuller Employment?” (1965) and a theoretical discussion in Economica (1966) of the question whether destabilizing speculation can be profitable.

According to Dr Lucy Joan Slater, Farrell was the first person to use the Electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) I and to program regression analysis.

[7][8] Dr. Slater reported years later “Professor Kaldor (Nicholas Kaldor) said that Mike had infected the economics faculty with numeracy!” Leaving aside religious economic debates about whether productive inefficiency can exist, previous attempts to measure it largely fell into two classes.

This amounts to approximating the feasible production set by the convex hull of observed input-output combinations.

This work (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 1957) has been very influential and exceptionally highly (and durably) cited.