Michael Keane, PhD

Michael Keane is a Wm. Polk Carey Distinguished Professor at Carey Business School. He has previously held positions as the Nuffield Professor of Economics at Oxford, and as Professor of Economics at UNSW, Yale, NYU and Minnesota. He is considered a leading expert on choice modeling (the mathematical modeling of consumer choice behavior) and life-cycle modeling, and has published over 100 papers in top journals in economics and marketing.

Keane's 1996 Marketing Science paper with Tulin Erdem is considered a foundational contribution to the literature on consumer learning and brand equity, and his 1997 Journal of Political Economy paper with Kenneth Wolpin is considered a foundational contribution to the literature on human capital. His 1994 Econometrica paper on the GHK algorithm was an important early contribution to the literature on simulation estimation, which makes it feasible to implement discrete choice models with large numbers of alternatives (as is often the case in real world markets) and complex patterns of consumer heterogeneity.

Keane has made significant contributions to the modeling of consumer demand, including brand choice and brand equity. This includes work on how consumers choose in complex environments in which choice sets are large, alternatives are complex, or both. In labor economics he has developed rich life-cycle models that incorporate a complex array of choices, including education, labor supply, marriage and fertility. He has worked in a wide range of applied areas including health economics, the economics of education, child development, forecasting, industrial organization, international trade, and the economics of transition economies. And he has made important contributions to panel data econometrics and structural econometric methods.

Education

• PhD, Economics, Brown University
• BS, Economics, MIT

Research

Selected publications

• Decision Making under Uncertainty: Capturing Dynamic Brand Choice Processes in Turbulent Consumer Goods Markets. Marketing Science, 1996, 15:1, 1-20, with Tulin Erdem (John D.C. Little Award).
• Are Financial Analysts' Forecasts of Corporate Profits Rational? Journal of Political Economy, 1998, 106:4, 768-805, with David Runkle.
• A Model of Health Plan Choice: Inferring Preferences and Perceptions from a Combination of Revealed Preference and Attitudinal Data. Journal of Econometrics, 1998, 89: 131-157, with Katherine Harris.
• Intertemporal Labor Supply and Human Capital Accumulation. International Economic Review, 2004, 45:2, 601-642, with Susumu Imai.
• Behavior in a Dynamic Decision Problem: An Analysis of Experimental Evidence Using a Bayesian Type Classification Algorithm. Econometrica, 2004, 72:3, 781-822, with Dan Houser and Kevin McCabe.
• A Dynamic Model of Brand Choice when Price and Advertising Signal Product Quality, Marketing Science, 2008, 27:6, 1111-25, with Tulin Erdem and Baohong Sun. (Runner-up, John D.C. Little Award).
• Adverse Selection, Moral Hazard and the Demand for Medigap Insurance. Journal of Econometrics, 2016, 190:1, 62-78, with Olena Stavrunova. (Dennis J. Aigner Award).
• Career and Family Decisions: Cohorts Born 1935-1975, Econometrica, 2019, 87:1, pp. 217-253, with Zvi Eckstein and Osnat Lifshitz.

Working papers

• Health Shocks, Health Insurance, and the Life-Cycle Dynamics of Earnings and Health, with Elena Capatina.
• A Life-Cycle Model of Demand for Housing, with Xiangling Liu.
• Human Capital and Optimal Taxation, with Han Gao, Kaja Kierulf and Alan Woodland.

Teaching

Current

• Customer Analytics

Honors and distinctions

• John D.C. Little Award (INFORMS), 1996.
• Australian Federation Fellow, June 2005.
• Fellow of the Econometric Society, 2005.
• Kenneth J. Arrow Award, 2008.
• Council of the Econometric Society, 2010-2012, 2019-2022.
• Australian Laureate Fellow, August 2011.
• Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2012.
• Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics, 2016.
• Dennis J. Aigner Award, 2017.
• Founding Fellow, International Association of Applied Econometrics, 2018.
• Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE), 2021.
• Associate Editor, Journal of Econometrics (2009-present)

Impact and engagement

Business

• Co-Director of Censoc (2006-11), an industry/university market research partnership at UTS

Policy

• Consultant to Australian Federal Treasury
• Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) International Research Fellow
• ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (Cepar)
• NIH Social Sciences Panel (various years)
• Brief amicus curiae of Economists to US Supreme Court in Support of SFFA

Community

• Fundraising for Fass School and Les Foyers de Tambacounda in Senegal

In the media

• "Off the chart: Australians were world leaders in panic buying, beating UK and Italy,"
• "Panic index shows Australians were the world's best panic buyers"
• "This Safety Net Supports Work"