Agustín Maravall

Homage “Celebrating 25 years of TRAMO-SEATS and the 70th birthday of Agustín Maravall,” hosted by the Bank of Spain, March 2014, with the participation of researchers from universities, central banks and statistical agencies in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the USA.

2004 Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics, sponsored by the Washington Statistical Society, the National Association for Business Economics, and the American Statistical Association, Business and Economics Section. Rey Jaime I Prize in Economics, 2005, sponsored by the Spanish Royal House, the "Fundación Premios Rey Jaime I,” and the Generalitat Valenciana. First Galicia Prize in Statistics, 2006, sponsored by the Caixa Galicia Foundation and the Galicia Statistical Institute. Rey Juan Carlos Prize in Economics, 2014, sponsored by the Celma Foundation and presented by the King of Spain.

Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics, 1995; Fellow of the American Statistical Association, 2000.

With the collaboration of Víctor Gómez (1987–1999) and Gianluca Caporello (1990–2015), the research was incorporated into several computer programs: TRAMO (“Time series Regression with ARIMA noise, Missing values, and Outliers”), SEATS (“Signal Extraction in ARIMA Time Series”), and TSW (“Tramo and Seats for Windows”). An extension of TRAMO, TERROR (“TRAMO for errors”), contains an application of Maravall's research to data editing (the program detects possible errors in incoming data that is part of large time-series data sets).

After a childhood in Paris, Maravall moved to Madrid and finished secondary school at the Colegio Estudio, completed a doctorate in agricultural engineering at the Technical University of Madrid, and worked for several years at the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture. With a Fulbright-Ford fellowship he came to the United States and completed a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1975, he moved to Washington, D.C. to work as a staff economist in the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. In 1979, he returned to Madrid as a senior economist in the Research Department of the Bank of Spain, and in 1989 he moved to Italy as Full Professor in the Department of Economics of the European University Institute in Florence. In 1996, he returned to the Bank of Spain as Chief Economist and Head of the Time Series Analysis Unit.

Former Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Fellow (1973–75); Fulbright-Ford Fellow (1971–73); Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society Fellow (1975); Oficial de la Orden Civil del Mérito Agrario (1971). Elected member of the International Statistical Institute (1988).

Agustín Maravall Herrero (born in 1944 in Madrid) is a Spanish economist known for his contributions to the analysis of statistics and econometrics, particularly in seasonal adjustment and the estimation of signals in economic time series. He created a methodology and several computer programs for this analysis that are used throughout the world by analysts, researchers, and data producers. An important use of these is the official production of series, adjusted for seasonality and other undesirable effects such as noise, outliers, or missing observations. Maravall has received several awards and distinctions and retired in December 2014 from the Bank of Spain.