Nissan Liviatan was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1925 and immigrated with his family to Eretz Yisrael (Mandatory Palestine) in 1936.

He earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, completing his doctorate in 1962. He began teaching in the Department of Economics in 1957 and joined its senior faculty in 1963. He served as Head of the Department from 1971 to 1972. In 1992 he became the first incumbent of the Don Patinkin Chair in Economics, which the Hebrew University established in honor of Patinkin, the founder of the study of modern economics in Israel’s academia, and Liviatan’s mentor and close colleague. Liviatan played an active role in designing the 1985 Stabilization Plan, which freed the Israeli economy from the inflationary spiral that began in the late 1970s and intensified by the mid-1980s. He was a Fellow of the Econometric Society and served as President of the Israeli Economic Association. He was awarded the Rothschild Prize in Social Sciences in 1990 and the Israel Prize in Economics in 2007.

His main research areas included: economic growth theory; econometric methodology; the relationship between income and consumption; international economics; the history of the Bank of Israel, and of Israel's monetary policy; inflationary processes and methods to curb them.
 

Nissan Liviatan passed away in Jerusalem in 2016.