Charles P. Kindleberger, an economic historian who advanced the study of international finance and helped to devise the Marshall Plan for Europe's reconstruction after World War II, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92.
Professor Kindleberger won fame for originating the idea that global markets could not entirely police themselves. He wrote that leadership, as shown by Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th, was essential to contain monetary crises.
He was also known for investigating the role of mob psychology in financial manias and panics, dating back to the tulip crisis in Holland early in the 17th century.
Unlike many academic economists of his time, Professor Kindleberger followed his education with a decade of practical experience in government, a period that spanned the end of the Great Depression and World War II. Decades later, his early grapplings with the problems of the American economy led him to write "The World in Depression: 1929-1939" - a work that drew him solidly into the field of economic history.
"He brought into international economics some theoretical background but a great deal of worldly wisdom along with it," said Robert A. Mundell, a former student of Professor Kindleberger's who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1999 and is now a professor at Columbia University. "He had a very well-developed, quick and imaginative sense of the real problems of the real world."
Charles Poor Kindleberger II was born in New York City on Oct. 12, 1910. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1932 and completed his doctorate at Columbia University under James W. Angell, a monetary theorist, in 1937.
When the United States became embroiled in World War II, he interrupted a stint at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to seek a naval commission. Dissatisfied with his proposed posting at a desk job, he instead joined the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 1942. He later became a major in the 12th Army Group in Europe, picking targets for Allied bombing based on enemy supply lines, and was awarded the Bronze Star by Gen. Omar Bradley.
After the war, Professor Kindleberger served as chief of the State Department's Division of German and Austrian Economic Affairs. He later spent long hours at the Pentagon helping estimate the costs of the European Recovery Program proposed in 1947 by George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state.
Congressional approval of the program, which came to be known as the Marshall Plan, coincided with Professor Kindleberger's move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948. He started as an associate professor and retired in 1976 as the Ford International Professor of Economics.
During his tenure, he was a consultant to the federal government several times, most often for the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. In 1985, he was president of the American Economic Association.
Though Professor Kindleberger's academic focus was often international, he was committed to education at home. He took a leave in 1967 and 1968 to visit the predominantly black colleges of the Atlanta University Center, where he taught courses and guided the development of economics curricula.
Professor Kindleberger wrote dozens of books, including a landmark textbook on international economics, first published in 1953, and a retrospective on the intersection of politics and economics in different countries, published in 2000. He also wrote an autobiography, "The Life of an Economist," in 1991.
"I have a strong impression that economics is a countercyclical industry that attracts adherents when times are troubled," he wrote. "Some are drawn to the subject by the opportunity to do good, to save the world, so to speak, by curing depression. The stronger drive in my view is curiosity. How does the economy work, and what has gone wrong?"
Professor Kindleberger was married to Sarah Bache Miles from 1937 until her death in 1997. He had lived in Lexington, Mass., since 1989. He is survived by two sons, Charles Poor III of St. Louis and Richard Stockton Kindleberger of Boston; two daughters, Sarah Kindleberger of Lincoln, Mass., and Elizabeth Randall Kindleberger of Machias, Me.; and five grandchildren.