Sendhil Mullainathan

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Sendhil Mullainathan - Behavioral Economics of Extreme Poverty - 2014 (13927918920) (cropped) .jpg

Audio file / audio sample Sendhil Mullainathan ? / I (*1973;Tamil செந்தில் முல்லைநாதன்) is aIndian-American Economist, the professor of economics at theHarvard Universityoperates. Mullainathan's research interests are inbehavioral economics,povertyeconomics,and research onpublic policy. Furthermore, it is one of the founders of theAbdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Laband a formerFellowof theMacArthur Foundation.

childhood and education

Sendhil Mullainathan was born in a small village in India and moved to Los Angeles at the age of seven . After finishing school, he attended Cornell University from 1990 to 1993 , from which he received a BA in computer science , economics and mathematics with the distinction magna cum laude . He then moved to Harvard University , which gave him a Ph.D. in 1998 for his dissertation “Essays in Applied Microeconomics” ( Essays in Applied Microeconomics ). awarded in economics. These doctoral supervisors were the renowned economists Drew Fudenberg , Lawrence Katz and Andrei Shleifer . During his studies at Harvard Mullainathan was awarded the Harvard University Merit Fellowship (1993–1996), as well as the Sumner Slichter Fellowship (1996–1997).

Professional background

After his Ph.D. Mullainathan went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he first taught as an Assistant Professor without a Chair (1998-2000), then as the Mark Hyman Jr. Assistant Professor (2000-2002) and finally Associate Professor (2002-2004) and researched. The Ph.D. courses he taught included macroeconomic theory, economics and psychology, and corporate finance. In 2003, Mullainathan founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT together with Professors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo , a network that uses randomized controlled trials to test the effectiveness of measures to reduce poverty. In September 2004, Mullainathan accepted a position at his alma mater, Harvard University , where he became professor of economics. Following his interest in microfinance , Mullainathan co-founded the Financial Access Initiative in 2006, alongside Dean Karlan and Jonathan Morduch , a research center at New York University that aims to improve poor households' access to and use of financial services. Together with Schoar , Djankov , Shafir , Kling and Kremer , Mullainathan founded the think tank Ideas42 in 2008 to apply a behavioral science perspective to socio-political problems. Since July 2011, Mullainathan has also been Deputy Research Director at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau , a national authority responsible for consumer protection in relation to financial products.

Mullainathan is also a research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research , a board member of the Bureau of Research in Economic Analysis of Development, faculty affiliate of the Center for International Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University), a researcher with NPO Innovations for Poverty Action and a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable.

research

According to the economic publications database IDEAS , Mullainathan is just under the top 1% in the overall ranking (342th place). Mullainathan also clearly belongs to the top 5% of the economists recorded in the database under criteria such as "number of publications" or "number of citations". Mullainathan's most cited article is entitled " How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates " (2002) and was co- authored with Marianne Bertrand and Esther Duflo . In this article, Bertrand, Duflo, and Mullainathan analyze Difference-in-Difference Estimation (DID), a causal relationship estimation method, and conclude that DID, in its conventional use , significantly underestimates the standard error of the estimated effect of the intervention under study. In order to counter the autocorrelation problem, Bertrand, Duflo and Mullainathan finally propose three solutions: a coincidence of the data in periods before and after the procedure, the use of a special covariance matrix or an adaptation of the randomization interference test methods.

Mullainathan's main research contributions, the academic importance of which is reflected by their citation in the specialist literature, also include the following:

In 2000, Bertrand, Luttmer, and Mullainathan contributed to network theory by examining, based on information about the language spoken at home, whether being surrounded by people of the same language made the use of welfare greater for individuals in groups with high average participation increased in welfare programs. The reason for this study was the hypothesis that pervades the academic literature that network effects would cause a culture of poverty . The study found that social networks have a strong influence on the use of social assistance and found evidence that networks actually support a culture of poverty.

In 2001, Mullainathan and Bertrand examined whether respondents say what they really think in surveys . The results of their studies showed that the empirical literature tends to support the skepticism of economists about subjective questions and that the use of subjective data in an econometric context is questionable, although these subjective data can be useful as explanatory variables (but care should be taken here that causality is not necessarily given). Finally, Mullainathan's and Bertrand's empirical studies indicated that subjective variables are useful in practice in explaining differences in behavior among individuals.

Together with Bertrand and Mehta, Mullainathan analyzed tunneling in 2002, i. H. the vertical exploitation of indirectly owned companies, in India. For this purpose, Bertrand, Mehta and Mullainathan developed an empirical method to estimate the extent of tunneling in companies. Applying this method to Indian companies resulted in a significant amount of theft, mostly related to ownership and mostly related to non-operating profit.

In an article published in 2004, Mullainathan and Bertrand examined discrimination against minorities in the US labor market. The study's findings strongly suggested that ethnic discrimination is a major factor in why African-Americans are less economically successful than other ethnic groups. For example, the study was able to convincingly demonstrate that applicants with typically Afro-American names, regardless of qualification and gender, received fewer queries and that this did not change even if the qualifications of this group of applicants improved.

In 2013 he published the book "Scarcity - what it does to us when we have too little" together with Eldar Shafir . The authors state that all forms of scarcity - regardless of whether they are shortages of goods or social resources - lead to similar restrictions.

Awards

Over the course of his career, Mullainathan has received a variety of research grants, fellowships, and awards. The most important include the Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2001-2003), the MacArthur Fellowship of the MacArthur Foundation (2003-2008) and various research grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , the International Finance Corporation (for Mullainathan's work in the Financial Access Initiative ), the Rand Corporation and the National Science Foundation . In 2016 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

literature

Books

  • Congdon, William J., Jeffrey R. Kling, Sendhil Mullainathan (2011): Policy and Choice: Public Finance through the Lens of Behavioral Economics , Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
  • Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir : Scarcity - why having too little means so much. London: Allen Lane , an imprint of Penguin Books , 2013, ISBN 978-1-84614-345-8 .

Article (selection)

  • Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan (2000): Agents with and without Principals , American Economic Review, Vol. 90, No. 2, pp. 203-208.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Erzo FP Luttmer, Sendhil Mullainathan (2000): Network Effects And Welfare Cultures , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 115, No. 3, pp. 1019-1055.
  • Mullainathan, Sendhil, David Scharfstein (2001): Do Firm Boundaries Matter? , American Economic Review, Vol. 91, No. 2, pp. 195-199.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan (2001): Do People Mean What They Say? Implications for Subjective Survey Data , American Economic Review, Vol. 91, No. 2, pp. 67-72.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan (2001): Are CEOs Rewarded For Luck? The Ones Without Principals Are , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 116, No. 3, pp. 901-932.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Paras Mehta, Sendhil Mullainathan (2002): Ferreting Out Tunneling: An Application To Indian Business Groups , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 117, No. 1, pp. 121-148.
  • Mullainathan, Sendhil (2002): A Memory-Based Model Of Bounded Rationality , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 117, No. 3, pp. 735-774.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan (2003): Enjoying the Quiet Life? Corporate Governance and Managerial Preferences , Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 111, No. 5, pp. 1043-1075.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir (2004): A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty , American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, pp. 419-423.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Esther Duflo, Sendhil Mullainathan (2004): How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates? , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 119, No. 1, pp. 249-275.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan (2004): Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination , American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 4, pp. 991-1013.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Dolly Chugh, Sendhil Mullainathan (2005): Implicit Discrimination , American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 2, pp. 94-98.
  • Mullainathan, Sendhil, Andrei Shleifer (2005): The Market for News , American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 4, pp. 1031-1053.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, et al. (2007): Obtaining a Driver's License in India: An Experimental Approach to Studying Corruption , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 122, No. 4, pp. 1639–1676.
  • Mullainathan, Sendhil, Joshua Schwartzstein, Andrei Shleifer (2008): Coarse Thinking and Persuasion , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 123, No. 2, pp. 577-619.
  • Banerjee, Abhijit, Sendhil Mullainathan (2008): Limited Attention and Income Distribution , American Economic Review, Vol. 98, No. 2, pp. 489-93.
  • Brown, Jeffrey et al. (2008): Why Don't People Insure Late-Life Consumption? A Framing Explanation of the Under-Annuitization Puzzle , American Economic Review, Vol. 98, No. 2, pp. 304-09.
  • Mullainathan, Sendhil, Ebonya Washington (2009): Sticking with Your Vote: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes , American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 86–111.
  • Kaur, Supreet, Michael Kremer, Sendhil Mullainathan (2010): Self-Control and the Development of Work Arrangements , American Economic Review, Vol. 100, No. 2, pp. 624-28.
  • Bertrand, Marianne, Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, Jonathan Zinman (2010): What's Advertising Content Worth? Evidence from a Consumer Credit Marketing Field Experiment , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 125, No. 1, pp. 263-305.
  • Kamenica, Emir, Sendhil Mullainathan, Richard Thaler (2011): Helping Consumers Know Themselves , American Economic Review, Vol. 101, No. 3, pp. 417-22.
  • Kling R. Jeffrey et al. (2012): Comparison Friction: Experimental Evidence from Medicare Drug Plans , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 127, No. 1, pp. 199-235.

source

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Founding history of the Poverty Action Lab (English)
  2. ↑ Founding history of the Financial Access Initiative (English)
  3. ↑ Founding history of the think tank ideas42 (English) ( Memento of the original from January 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ideas42.org
  4. ↑ List of researchers working for Innovations for Poverty Actions (English)
  5. ↑ Overall ranking of the economic publications database IDEAS (English)
  6. ↑ Author profile of Sendhil Mullainathan on IDEAS (English)
  7. ↑ Bertrand, Marianne, Esther Duflo, Sendhil Mullainathan (2004): "Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates?" (English)
  8. ↑ Quotes from articles and working papers of Sendhil Mullainathans on IDEAS (English)
  9. ↑ Bertrand, Marianne, Erzo FP Luttmer, Sendhil Mullainathan (2000): "Network Effects and Welfare Cultures" (English)
  10. ↑ Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan (2001): “Do People Say What They Mean?” (PDF; 133 kB)
  11. ↑ Bertrand, Marianne, Paras Mehta, Sendhil Mullainathan (2002): "Ferreting Out Tunneling" (English)
  12. ↑ Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan (2004): “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?”  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / karlan.research.yale.edu  
  13. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences : Newly Elected Fellows. In: amacad.org. Retrieved April 22, 2016 .

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Commons : Sendhil Mullainathan  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Mullainathan, Sendhil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian-American economist
DATE OF BIRTH 1973