James Tobin (March 5, 1918 March 11, 2002) was an American economist who in his lifetime, had served on the Council of Economic Advisors, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and had taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored endogenous variables, the well known "Tobit model". Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.