Director of Anderson Project at UCLA to Retire This Month

Larry J. Kimbell, a UCLA business professor and longtime director of the respected Anderson Forecasting Project at the university, is retiring at the end of this month.

He will be succeeded by Daniel J.B. Mitchell, who has been co-director of the project this last year. Mitchell, a professor of human resources and organizational behavior at UCLA, has been involved with the Anderson Forecast since the late 1960s.

Kimbell, 60, joined the forecasting group in the fall of 1973, just as the nation was entering recession amid a Middle East war, oil shocks and rising interest rates. As he prepares to leave with the upcoming quarterly forecast to be released next week, the national economy is nearing the longest expansion on record.

Yet it was during those more tumultuous ‘70s and ‘80s that Kimbell and his colleagues were severely tested. Often they were wrong, but as Kimbell recalled, the great uncertainty of those times brought out a hunger for forecasts that is absent today.

“It was more fun. There was more interest,” Kimbell said Wednesday from Amarillo, Texas, his native town where he has been living with his wife, Shearer, and commuting to UCLA for the last year and half. During the depths of the recession in December 1974, Kimbell remembered 900 people turning out to hear UCLA’s forecast. In more recent times, the quarterly forecasts have drawn an audience of about 150, he said.

Kimbell likened his forecasting career to a quarterback who keeps getting his head banged up but still charges ahead. “You’re going to keep making errors, but you roll with the punches,” he said.

His most notoriously bad forecast, he said: predicting that the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 would lead to a sharp rise in unemployment.

His best earned him the prestigious Sterling prize for forecasting in 1988 for the most accurate forecast of the U.S. economy.

Kimbell will be reflecting on his 25 years of projections at the upcoming conference of the Anderson Forecast on Wednesday.

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