Austrian economist. He studied law, economics and psychology in Vienna. With Ludwig von Mises he founded the Austrian Institute of Economic Research in 1927; their ‘Austrian School’ favoured laisser faire and minimal government using monetary policy to smooth out the business cycle. At the London School of Economics from 1931, he became a British citizen in 1938. He then held a position in the University of Chicago (1950–62) and at the University of Freiburg, Germany, from 1968. He won the Nobel prize for economics in 1974. Although his early works were influential, The Pure Theory of Capital (1941) was published too late to reverse the growing influence of J M Keynes. His hostility to socialism and conviction that free politics could only be sustained by free markets attracted renewed attention in the 1980s and 1990s, influencing the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the US presidents Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.