Charles F. Manski

Last updated
Charles F. Manski
Born (1948-11-27) November 27, 1948 (age 75)
Academic career
Institution Northwestern University
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Carnegie-Mellon University
Field Econometrics
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Boston Latin School
Doctoral
advisor
Franklin M. Fisher
Doctoral
students
Francesca Molinari
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Charles Frederick Manski (born November 27, 1948) is an American economist and university professor at the Northwestern University. Manski is a noted econometrician, known for his work in rational choice theory and an innovator in the area of parameter identification. [1] His research spans econometrics, judgment and decision, and the analysis of social policy (such as work on school choice). A specialist in prediction and decision, he is known within the economics field for landmark work on partial identification, identification of discrete choice models, and identification of social interactions. He has also performed substantial empirical research on measurement of expectations in surveys.

Contents

Manski was predicted to win the Nobel Prize in 2015 by Reuters along with two other economists. Chicago economist John A. List for his work on field experiments and English economist Richard Blundell for his work on labor markets were also listed as favorites to win a future Nobel Prize.

Early life

He is the son of Holocaust survivor and Sugihara visa recipient Samuil Manski [2] and Estelle Zonn Manski. He grew up in Dorchester and West Roxbury, both in Massachusetts, attended Boston Latin School, and spent many afternoons in the family diner. [3] One day, while leading a Torah reading, he had an epiphany that led him away from religious studies and towards scientific skepticism:

"[I] learned something about why dogmas can be tenacious and irreconcilable. Many doctrines pose nonrefutable hypotheses. That is, they make statements about the world that are impossible to disprove. For example, it is impossible to disprove the hypothesis that the god of the Torah created the universe in six days and then rested on the seventh day. It is similarly impossible to disprove the hypothesis that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster." [4]

Personal life

Manski is married to Catherine Manski, a lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [5] He has two children, educator Rebecca Manski and sociologist Ben Manski, and three grandchildren. [6]

Academic career

He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1970 and 1973. He first taught at Carnegie Mellon University (1973–1980), moving on to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1978–1983), and joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (U.W., 1983–1998). While at the U.W., Manski served as Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty (1988–1991) and as Chair of the Board of Overseers of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1994–1998). Since 1997 Manski has been Board of Trustees Professor in Economics at Northwestern University. [7]

Manski has served as a member of the National Research Council's (NRC) Committee on National Statistics (1996–2000), and the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (1992–1998). At the NRC, he has been Chair of the Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs (1998–2001) and a member of the Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications (2004–2007) and the Committee on Law and Justice (2009–). Manski is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [7] In 2009, Manski was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; he is one of 2 economists elected to the body in 2009 and one of about 60 economists elected up to that point. [8] In 2014 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. [9]

War on Drugs

Manski served on the NRC's Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs, which studied the war on drugs. The committee report found that existing studies on efforts to address drug usage and smuggling, from US military operations to eradicate coca fields in Colombia, to domestic drug treatment centers, have all been inconclusive, if the programs have been evaluated at all: "The existing drug-use monitoring systems are strikingly inadequate to support the full range of policy decisions that the nation must make.... It is unconscionable for this country to continue to carry out a public policy of this magnitude and cost without any way of knowing whether and to what extent it is having the desired effect." [10] The study was mentioned by the press but was initially ignored by policymakers, leading Manski to conclude, as one observer noted, that "the drug war has no interest in its own results." [11]

Research

Manski's work in econometrics includes the development of tools for partial identification, the maximum score estimator for discrete choice models, and work on the "reflection problem" in models of peer effects.

As of 2007, Manski's research interests focus primarily on the field of formation of social policy with partial knowledge of treatment response. Economists and doctors alike share a common interest in gauging the effect of various "treatments" delivered to "patients." [12] Since research on treatment response rarely provides sufficient information to determine effectiveness, how should the available evidence be employed in choosing future treatments? [13]

Election predictions

In 2004, Manski challenged the theoretical basis for statements in the popular media "that markets can predict an election better than polls and experts can." [14]

Selected publications

Partial identification
Identification of discrete choice models
Identification of social interactions
Measurement of expectations in surveys
Other

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan Tinbergen</span> Dutch economist (1903–1994)

Jan Tinbergen was a Dutch economist who was awarded the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969, which he shared with Ragnar Frisch for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of econometrics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Goldberger</span> American economist

Arthur Stanley Goldberger was an econometrician and an economist. He worked with Nobel Prize winner Lawrence Klein on the development of the Klein–Goldberger macroeconomic model at the University of Michigan.

Alberto Abadie is a Spanish economist who has served as a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2016, where he is also Associate Director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). He is principally known for his work in econometrics and empirical microeconomics, and is a specialist in causal inference and program evaluation. He has made fundamental contributions to important areas in econometrics and statistics, including treatment effect models, instrumental variable estimation, matching estimators, difference in differences, and synthetic controls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angus Deaton</span> British-American economist (born 1945)

Sir Angus Stewart Deaton is a British-American economist and academic. Deaton is currently a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His research focuses primarily on poverty, inequality, health, wellbeing, and economic development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lars Peter Hansen</span> American economist

Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Tirole</span> French professor of economics

Jean Tirole is a French economist who is currently a professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University. He focuses on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and psychology. In particular, he focuses on the regulation of economic activity in a way that does not hinder innovation while maintaining fair rules.

Kenneth E. Train is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He is also Vice President of NERA Economic Consulting, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He received a Bachelors in Economics at Harvard and PhD from UC Berkeley. He specializes in econometrics and regulation, with applications in energy, environmental studies, telecommunications and transportation.

The methodology of econometrics is the study of the range of differing approaches to undertaking econometric analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Keane (economist)</span> American/Australian economist (born 1961)

Michael Patrick Keane is an American-born economist; he is the Wm. Polk Carey Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Keane was previously a professor at the University of New South Wales and the Nuffield Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. He is considered one of the world's leading experts in the fields of Choice Modelling, structural modelling, simulation estimation, and panel data econometrics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guido Imbens</span> Dutch-American econometrician

Guido Wilhelmus Imbens is a Dutch-American economist whose research concerns econometrics and statistics. He holds the Applied Econometrics Professorship in Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Rust</span> American economist and econometrician (born 1955)

John Philip Rust is an American economist and econometrician. John Rust received his PhD from MIT in 1983 and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University and University of Maryland before joining Georgetown University in 2012. John Rust was awarded Frisch Medal in 1992 and became the fellow of Econometric Society in 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Durlauf</span> American economist

Steven Neil Durlauf is an American social scientist and economist. He is currently Steans Professor in Educational Policy and the inaugural Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Durlauf was previously the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As of 2021, is also a Part Time Professor at the New Economic School.

The social multiplier effect is a term used in economics, economic geography, sociology, public health and other academic disciplines to describe certain social externalities. It is based on the principle that high levels of one attribute amongst one's peers can have spillover effects on an individual. "This social multiplier can also be thought of as a ratio ∆P/∆I where ∆I is the average response of an individual action to an exogenous parameter and ∆P is the response of the peer group to a change in the same parameter that affects the entire peer group." In other words, it is the ratio of an individual action to an exogenous parameter to the aggregate effect of the same parameter on the individual's peers.

Charles Frederick Roos was an American economist who made contributions to mathematical economics. He was one of the founders of the Econometric Society together with American economist Irving Fisher and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch in 1930. He served as secretary-treasurer during the first year of the society and was elected as president in 1948. He was director of research of the Cowles Commission from September 1934 to January 1937.

Victor Chernozhukov is a Russian-American statistician and economist currently at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on mathematical statistics and machine learning for causal structural models in high-dimensional environments. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a master's in statistics in 1997 and received his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2000.

Petra Elisabeth (Crockett) Todd is an American economist whose research interests include labor economics, development economics, microeconomics, and econometrics. She is the Edward J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and is also affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, the Human Capital and Equal Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO), the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In statistics and econometrics, set identification extends the concept of identifiability in statistical models to environments where the model and the distribution of observable variables are not sufficient to determine a unique value for the model parameters, but instead constrain the parameters to lie in a strict subset of the parameter space. Statistical models that are set identified arise in a variety of settings in economics, including game theory and the Rubin causal model. Unlike approaches that deliver point-identification of the model parameters, methods from the literature on partial identification are used to obtain set estimates that are valid under weaker modelling assumptions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred Galichon</span> French Economist and Mathematician

Alfred Galichon is a French economist and mathematician. His work focuses on quantitative economics and econometrics. He is a professor of economics and of mathematics at New York University.

Francesca Molinari is an Italian economist and economic statististician specializing in theoretical and applied econometrics, whose research topics include risk aversion, survey methodology, and set identification. She is H. T. Warshow and Robert Irving Warshow Professor of Economics and Professor of Statistics at Cornell University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yingyao Hu</span> American economist (born 1972)

Yingyao Hu 胡颖尧 is a Chinese American economist, the Krieger-Eisenhower professor of economics, and currently Vice Dean for Social Sciences, Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Johns Hopkins University.

References

  1. Charles Manski, Partial Identification of Probability Distributions, New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003.
  2. Manski, Samuil (1990). With God's Help . Retrieved 2019-06-16.
  3. "CharlesManski.com" . Retrieved October 9, 2015.
  4. Manski, Charles (Spring 2010). "Unlearning and Discovery" (PDF). The American Economist. 55: 9–18. doi:10.1177/056943451005500102. S2CID   33759962 . Retrieved October 9, 2015.
  5. "UIC English Department". Archived from the original on 2009-02-02.
  6. "Charles F. Manski: About Charles Manski". www.charlesmanski.com. Retrieved 2015-10-10.
  7. 1 2 "Charles Manski biography at Northwestern" (PDF). Retrieved 2019-06-16.
  8. "Charles Manski Elected to National Academy of Sciences" Archived September 23, 2009, at the Wayback Machine April 29, 2009
  9. "British Academy announces 42 new fellows". Times Higher Education. 18 July 2014. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
  10. "No Data on Effectiveness" (PDF). Archived from the original on December 5, 2008. Retrieved September 27, 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), Drug Policy Education Group, Vol. 2 No.1, Spring/Summer 2001, p.5
  11. "Weekly News in Review", DrugSense Weekly, August 31, 2001 #215
  12. "Charles Manski biography at Institute for Policy Research". Archived from the original on 2011-11-08. Retrieved 2008-05-10.
  13. C. Manski, Social Choice with Partial Knowledge of Treatment Response, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. C. Manski, "Diversified Treatment under Ambiguity," International Economic Review, 2009, forthcoming.
  14. Stix, Gary. "Super Tuesday: Markets Predict Outcome Better Than Polls"; Scientific American, February 2008

Further reading