Ilse Mintz

Ilse Schüller was born on 19 June 1904 in Vienna, the eldest daughter of the trade-ministry official and economist Richard Schüller and Ernestine Rosenthal. She grew up in an upper-middle-class, assimilated Jewish household closely interwoven with the economic and diplomatic elites of the late Habsburg monarchy and the First Republic. Her sisters Susanne Schüller-Piroli (a historian) and Hilde Kurz (an art historian) reflect the family's pattern of scholarly, middle-class socialization. At the University of Vienna she studied economics and received her doctorate under Ludwig von Mises in 1927. Mises admitted her to his private seminar, where she concentrated on questions of foreign trade. In December 1926 she married the business lawyer Maximilian Mintz, with whom she had two children: Walter Mintz (1929–2004, later a hedge-fund manager) and Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024, a literary scholar). In the 1930s she worked at the Vienna Institute for Business Cycle Research, then directed by Hayek and later by Morgenstern. After the Anschluss the family fled on 12 March 1938 via Switzerland and the Netherlands to New York. In the United States Mintz continued her academic career: from 1943 she studied again at Columbia University and earned a second doctorate in 1951, supervised by Arthur F. Burns, the later chairman of the Federal Reserve. Her dissertation on the deterioration in quality of foreign bonds in the 1920s appeared in 1951 as an NBER monograph and is still regarded as a standard reference on the preconditions of the bond crisis. As a senior research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research she worked closely with Burns and Wesley C. Mitchell and published a series of influential studies on international trade and business cycles: on the American-British trade balance (1959), on fluctuations in US exports (1961, 1967), and on the methodology of business-cycle dating, using West Germany as an example (1969). In parallel she taught as an associate professor and, from the 1960s, as professor of economics at Columbia. After retiring as emerita in 1969 she moved to Washington, taught at the Catholic University of America, and in 1973 published for the American Enterprise Institute the much-cited study "U.S. Import Quotas: Costs and Consequences". She died on 19 June 1978 in Washington, D.C., on her 74th birthday.