We are pleased to host Professor Andrew Caplin. He is Silver Professor of Economics at NYU.

Professor Caplin has made contributions to many branches of pure and applied economics. One focus of his current research is modeling and measuring economic and health-related behaviors over the life cycle. A second focus is to understanding the significance of attentional constraints that prevent decision makers from achieving their goals. These are not un-related lines of research.

Abstract: The general theme of the talk is the vital role that carefully engineered data expansion will increasingly play in enriching our understanding of behavior. We are in an era in which we can profoundly influence data generation, and in so doing enhance our understanding not only of what individuals currently do, but also of how their behavior might respond to changes in the decision making environment. I will introduce a major ongoing project that gathers just such expanded data and in which we study spending, saving, investing, and health-related decisions over time. The project develops methods for uniting data derived from observed behavior with information derived from survey. I introduce these methods and indicate why they have particular value in understanding counter-factual behaviors.

Professor Caplin earned his doctoral degree in Economics from Yale. He was a member of the economics faculty at Harvard, Princeton and Columbia.

Here is a link to his recent research:http://cess.nyu.edu/caplin/

and a link to a recent course he taught "Behavioral and Experimental Economics: AKA - Enriching the Interplay Between Choice Theory and Data":http://128.122.11.92/caplin/teaching/.