Gregory C. Chow has been a major figure in econometrics and applied economics. Every beginning econometrics student learns the Chow test, a statistical test for structural change in a regression. However, Gregory's work extends far beyond his eponymous test. He was a major figure in the postwar flowering of econometrics, and his applied work included important research in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics (particularly on Southeast Asia). He has also been a major adviser on economic policy, economic reform, and economic education in both Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. 

Gregory grew up in Guangdong province in South China, one of seven children in a wealthy family. His father, Tin-Pong Chow, served as the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Guangzhou (the capital city of Guangdong) for many years; his mother, Pauline Law Chow, studied in England. When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the Chow family moved from Guangzhou to Hong Kong where Gregory attended primary school.

In 1942, after the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the family moved to Macao. The Chow family returned to Guangzhou in 1945 at the end of World War II. At the age of five Gregory learned swimming and the Chinese art of Tai Chi, both his father's hobbies, and he still practices both almost daily.

Being mathematically inclined, he took advantage of the strong mathematics department at Cornell after entering as a sophomore in 1948, following one year at Lingnan University in Guangzhou. But in the economics department, mathematical economics and econometrics were largely absent from the curriculum, and Gregory had to study these topics on his own. He learned enough to know that he wanted to specialize in econometrics. He learned enough to know that he wanted to specialize in econometrics and went on to graduate study at the University of Chicago, entering in the fall of 1951.

The 1950s were a heroic period for Chicago economics, with Milton Friedman the dominant intellectual figure. Gregory was strongly influenced by Friedman's views that economic models should be kept simple and judged mainly on their ability to explain the data. At Chicago Gregory took courses from other luminaries, such as the philosopher Rudoph Carnap, Henrik Houthakker, Tjalling Koopmans, William Kruskal, Jacob Marschak, L. J. Savage, and Allan Wallis. He also attended a seminar on methodology in the social sciences organized by Friedrich Hayek. The seminar's participants included the physicist Enrico Fermi, Friedman, Savage, Wallis, and fellow student Gary Becker.

Gregory's doctoral dissertation, which became a standard reference in empirical economics, was a study of the factors determining the demand for automobiles. After the publication of his thesis, Gregory was invited by Al Harberger of Chicago to write a paper extending his work. Gregory was curious to see whether the equations he had estimated in his thesis were applicable to data outside the sample period, and so he developed a statistical test for stability of the coefficients of a regression over time. This work was the origin of the Chow test.

Gregory's first position after receiving his Ph.D. in 1955 was at the Sloan School of Management of MIT, which had the only economics department that rivaled Chicago in the early 1950s. At MIT during those years Paul Samuelson was doing pioneering work in mathematical economics, and Robert Solow was developing the model of economic growth that remains central to current thinking on growth and business cycles. Thus, at both Chicago and MIT, Gregory was fortunate to have been exposed to some of the most fertile thinkers in early postwar economics. From MIT, Gregory accepted a tenured position at Cornell in 1959, his alma mater. But he found the environment there less suitable, and so he accepted an offer from Ralph Gomory to join the IBM Thomas Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, New York, for a year. Gregory so liked IBM that after a few months he resigned his professorship at Cornell to join the company---quite an unusual career move at the time. Gregory was highly productive at IBM, doing work in econometrics, applied economics (including studies of the demand for money, the demand for computers, and the multiplier-accelerator model of Keynesian macroeconomics), and dynamic economics. While at IBM Gregory also applied his economic analysis and judgment together with his econometric skills to advise on corporate planning and to solve business problems for the company. Beginning in the middle 1960's, he also visited Taiwan often and served as a major economic adviser to the local Taiwan authority.

In 1970, Gregory accepted a professorship at Princeton, succeeding Oskar Morgenstern as the Director of the Econometric Research Program. He remained Director for almost three decades, stepping down in 1997. In 2001 Princeton University renamed the Program the Gregory C. Chow Econometric Research Program in his honor. At Princeton he continued to do innovative research in both econometrics and applied economics. His econometric research included the study of simultaneous equation systems, both linear and nonlinear; full-information maximum likelihood estimation; estimation with missing observations; estimation of large macroeconomic models; modeling and forecasting with time series methods. Combining econometrics, economic theory, and macroeconomics, Gregory did path-breaking work on optimal control theory and its application to stochastic economic systems. In more recent years he developed and championed a solution approach for dynamic optimization problems using Lagrange multiplier methods. Gregory also published a number of monographs and popular textbooks (his econometrics textbook has been translated into Chinese and Polish). Among his eleven books are:

Demand for Automobiles for the United States, 1957; Analysis and Control of Dynamic Economic Systems, 1975; Econometrics, 1983; The Chinese Economy, 1985; Dynamic Economics, 1997, and China's Economic Transformation, 2002

From the middle 1960s, Gregory became increasingly interested in the economies of Taiwan and later the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, an interest that would result in many scholarly books and articles. Gregory visited East Asia many times, establishing contacts with policy-makers and businesspeople. He observed, and influenced, the remarkable growth of Taiwan and Hong Kong and played a role in the transformation of the economy of the Chinese mainland from a centrally planned economy to one with a large and robust market sector. In the process, Gregory became a well-known figure in China, and he also did a great deal for ties between China and the United States, including supporting education programs for Chinese students in both countries. His experiences and writings on China were the basis for a popular undergraduate course on the Chinese economy that Gregory taught regularly at Princeton for many years. What may yet become his most influential book, China's Economy in Transformation, was published by Blackwell in early 2002. In this book Gregory studies the process of Chinese economic transformation, as influenced by a combination of historical-institutional factors, government policy choices, and market-based incentives.

Gregory is a member of Academia Sinica and the American Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Econometric Society. He was Chairman of the American Economic Association's Committee on Exchanges in Economics with the People's Republic of China from 1981 to 1994, and Co-Chairman of the U.S. Committee on Economics Education and Research in China from 1985 to 1994. He served as adviser to the Premier and the Commission on Restructuring the Economic System of the PRC on the reform of China's economy. He has been appointed Honorary Professor at Fudan, Hainan, Nankai, Shandong, the People's and Zhongshan Universities and the City University of Hong Kong, and has received honorary doctorate degrees from Zhongzhan University and Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Gregory's wife, Paula K. Chow, is the director of Princeton's International Center. Paula co-founded the Center in 1974, with Louise Sayen, as a volunteer organization. The Center became a part of the University in 1978. With the help of over one hundred volunteers, friends and students, the Center serves the needs of Princeton's international and internationally-minded students and scholars. It also has initiated many intercultural programs on and off campus. Paula is popular figure in the Princeton community, and Gregory often jokes that he is best known in Princeton as Paula's husband. The couple has two sons, John and James, both engineers, and a daughter, Meimei, a radiologist.