Daniel McFadden 101: The Nobel Laureate Berkeley Economist

Daniel McFadden was born on July 29, 1937, in North Carolina, USA and is an American econometrician. Along with James Heckman, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for his work on “developing theory and methods for analysing discrete choice.”

McFadden currently serves as Presidental Professor of Health Economics at the University of Southern California and as a Professor at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. To learn more about Daniel McFadden, you can read this article on Zatrun.com.

Who is Daniel McFadden?

Daniel McFadden earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Minnesota and graduated at the age of 19. Five years later, he earned his PhD in Economics from the same university. During his time as a student at Minnesota, his advisor, Leonid Hurwicz, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2007. Today, McFadden is the Dean of Health Economics at the University of Southern California and a Professor at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

McFadden’s work includes economic theory, statistical methods, and empirical applications aimed at solving social issues. His Nobel Prize-winning “discrete choice analysis” helped predict usage rates in transportation systems.

The analysis involved methods for analysing individual or household behaviour, such as where people will work, where they will live, and how they make choices. This work has also been applied to various other topics such as statistics, labour force participation, health services, housing research, and the environment.

McFadden and His Academic Life

In 1964, Daniel McFadden began working as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focused on the integration of choice behaviour and economic theory with measurement. In 1974, he introduced conditional logit analysis.

McFadden won the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association in 1975. He moved from California to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981.

he returned to Berkeley in 1991 and established the Econometrics Laboratory dedicated to statistical computation for economic applications. Daniel McFadden is still the director of this laboratory. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security Foundation. McFadden won the Erwin Plein Nemmers Economics Prize in 2000 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. He was also appointed Presidential Professor of Health Economics at the University of Southern California in January 2011.