His paternal grandfather (professor of linguistics at the Berlin Humboldt Institute Carl Abel) and maternal grandmother were Jewish but converted to Christianity.
[4] He turned from the field of literature, with an interest in becoming a stage director, to philosophy and economics at the Universities of Munich and Heidelberg (Diplom-Volkswirt, 1933), then at Harvard (Ph.D., 1937).
Martin Feldstein is quoted in the New York Times obituary (Jan 20, 2007) "Richard Musgrave transformed economics in the 1950s and 1960s from a descriptive and institutional subject to one that used the tools of Microeconomics and Keynesian Macroeconomics to understand the effect of taxes."
This framework is the suggestion that government activity should be separated into three functions or "branches," macroeconomic stabilization, income redistribution and resource allocation.
"[7] The International Institute of Public Finance created an award in 2003 to commemorate the work conducted by Richard and his Peggy Brewer Musgrave.