David Cesarini | |
---|---|
David Alexander Cesarini | |
Nationality | American |
Academic career | |
Field | Behavioral economics Microeconomics |
Institution | New York University |
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 2010) [1] |
Doctoral advisor | David Laibson [1] Drazen Prelec [1] |
David Alexander Cesarini is an associate professor in the Department of Economics & Center for Experimental Social Science at New York University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as affiliated researcher at the Research Institute for Industrial Economics (IFN). [2] [3] [4] He is an empirically oriented economist with interests in social-science genetics, applied microeconomics and behavioral economics—especially known for his research in genoeconomics and the heritability of economic behaviors and attitudes, such as investing decisions and confidence. [5] [6]
His early work on genetics and social science applied methods from behavior genetics to various economic outcomes. These studies sought to infer the role of genetic factors by contrasting the resemblance of different kinships (usually twins—e.g., Cesarini et al. 2009). In recent years, his attention has gradually shifted towards applications with molecular genetic data. Much of his current research in social-science genetics is conducted under the auspices of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC), a research infrastructure he co-founded to facilitate rigorous genetic association studies of behavioral and social-science outcomes—such as dietary intake, educational attainment, health behaviors, risk preferences and subjective well-being. [7]
Outside of genetics, Cesarini works on a broad range of questions in applied microeconomics and behavioral economics. In collaboration with two IFN-affiliated researchers, Erik Lindqvist and Robert Östling, he helped instigate a research program on the causal impact of wealth on economic and behavioral outcomes. These studies all leverage the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players who have been matched to government records with information about health, labor supply, crime, marriage, and fertility and a host of other variables. The large and rich data set is an unusually valuable resource for making credible inferences about the causal impact of wealth. To date, the data assembled by the research team have used to study health-care utilization, mortality and child development (Cesarini et al. 2016), labor supply (Cesarini et al. 2017), subjective health (Östling, Cesarini, and Lindqvist 2020), subjective well-being (Lindqvist, Östling, and Cesarini 2020) as well as stock market participation (Briggs et al. 2020).
Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the economy as a whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.
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A Bachelor of Economics is an academic degree awarded to students who have completed undergraduate studies in economics. Specialized economics degrees are also offered as a "tagged" BA (Econ), BS (Econ) / BSc (Econ), BCom (Econ), and BSocSc (Econ), or variants such as the "Bachelor of Economic Science".
Sir Richard William Blundell CBE FBA is a British economist and econometrician.
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Esther Duflo, FBA is a French-American economist currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
Behavioural genetics, also referred to as behaviour genetics, is a field of scientific research that uses genetic methods to investigate the nature and origins of individual differences in behaviour. While the name "behavioural genetics" connotes a focus on genetic influences, the field broadly investigates the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences, and the development of research designs that can remove the confounding of genes and environment. Behavioural genetics was founded as a scientific discipline by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, only to be discredited through association with eugenics movements before and during World War II. In the latter half of the 20th century, the field saw renewed prominence with research on inheritance of behaviour and mental illness in humans, as well as research on genetically informative model organisms through selective breeding and crosses. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, technological advances in molecular genetics made it possible to measure and modify the genome directly. This led to major advances in model organism research and in human studies, leading to new scientific discoveries.
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Meike Bartels is a Dutch psychologist and behavior geneticist known for her research on the genetics of happiness and subjective well-being. She is professor in "Behavior and Quantitative Genetics" at the Department of Biological Psychology at VU University Amsterdam and affiliated with the Amsterdam Public Health Institute. She also holds a University Research Chair in Genetics and Wellbeing at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2008, she received the Fuller & Scott Award from the Behavior Genetics Association. She is one of the principal investigators on the study finding genetic variants related to well-being
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