Peter A. Tinsley (January 21, 1939 â March 19, 2018) was an American economist. His research focused on economic dynamics, dynamic optimization, monetary economics, and monetary policy, and econometrics issues.
In 1965, after receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University, Tinsley joined the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System as an Economist in the Division of Research and Statistics. In 1998 he retired as a Deputy Associate Director to join the Faculty of Economics and Politics at the University of Cambridge, where he taught from 1998 to 2003, first as a visitor and then as a permanent member. In 2006, he joined the Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics at Birkbeck College University of London, where he taught as full-Professor until 2014.
Soon after joining the Federal Reserve, Tinsley published a ground-breaking paper on variable-weight distributed lags which posited that contrary to extant modeling, delayed adjustments of capital and inventories where influenced by outside factors that varied over time in potentially cyclical ways. In design and concept, including the introduction of empirical measures of forward expectations, Tinsley was instrumental in the design of the Federal Reserve's FRBUS forward-looking macro-economic policy model designed to meet the Lucas Critique head-on, so that most behavioral equations are based on specifications of optimizing behavior containing explicit expectations of firms, households, and financial markets. This model is now used for FOMC monetary policy decision making.