Edward Fulton Denison was an American economist. He was a pioneer in the measurement of the United States gross national product and one of the founders of growth accounting

Growth accounting

Growth accounting is a procedure used in economics to measure the contribution of different factors to economic growth and to indirectly compute the rate of technological progress, measured as a residual, in an economy...

.

Denison earned an bachelor's degree in economics in Oberlin College

Oberlin College

Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...

 in 1936, a master's degree in Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

 in 1938, and a doctorate from Brown in 1941. In 1948, he became acting chief of the National Income Division of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. The next year, Edward also acted as Assistant Director and Chief Economist of the Office of Business Economics. In 1956 he left OBE to work for the Committee for Economic Development

Committee for Economic Development

The Committee for Economic Development is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan think tank based in Washington, DC. Its membership consists of some 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders...

. From 1963, he served as a senior member of the Brookings Institution

Brookings Institution

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and...

 on economic research.

Denison became a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association

American Economic Association

The American Economic Association, or AEA, is a learned society in the field of economics, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. It publishes one of the most prestigious academic journals in economics: the American Economic Review...

 in 1981.

He married Elsie Lightbown. His daughter, Janet Howell

Janet Howell

Janet Denison Howell is an American politician. A Democrat, she was elected to the Senate of Virginia in 1991. She still represented the 32nd district in Fairfax County .-Biography:...

 has served in the Virginia Senate since 1992.

Selected works

• Trends in American economic growth, 1929-1982 (1962), published on The Journal of Business
  The Journal of Business
  The Journal of Business was an academic journal published by the University of Chicago Press, said to be "the first scholarly journal to focus on business-related research"...
  
  
• The Residual Factor and Economic Growth (Paris
  Paris
  Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
  
  , 1962)
• The Sources of Economic Growth in the United States & the Alternatives Before us (New York
  New York
  New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
  
  , 1962), one that describes his theory mostly
• Why growth rates differ; postwar experience in nine western countries (Washington D. C., 1967)
• Accounting for United States economic growth, 1929-1969 (Washington D. C., 1974)
• Accounting for slower economic growth : the United States in the 1970's (Washington D. C., 1979)