Events

Speaker:

• Professor Steven D. Levitt
  The University of Chicago

Content

Professor Steven D. Levitt is currently Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Bar Foundation, as well as editor of the Journal of Political Economy.

Professor Levitt is well known for his innovative work in the study of various socio-economic issues, including crime, corruption and education. He is especially acclaimed for his ingenuity in sourcing and analyzing data, and in isolating causes and effects in complex human behavior. In recognition of his valuable contribution to economics, Professor Levitt was duly awarded the John Bates Clark medal, a prize awarded every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of 40, by the American Economic Association in 2003.

Professor Levitt gained widespread attention from the general public when his book Freakonomics (with Stephen J. Dubner) was published earlier this year. The best-seller describes his findings in accessible and non-technical terms, and so reveals "the hidden side of everything" to all which could be counterintuitive and unsettling to some. For example, successful parenting has more to do with who the parents are than how they parent, and crime rates dropped in the 1990s as a result of the legalization of abortion.

Professor Levitt also serves as Director of the Initiative on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago. It is a research center aimed to sustain and strengthen a research methodology that combines vigorous economic thinking and careful data-driven analysis, and that is exemplified in the path-breaking work of Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, George Stigler and others. In this talk, Professor Levitt will share with us his views on how to study and understand the real world in general, and the Chicago approach in particular.

Correspondence Address

Professor Steven D. Levitt
The University of Chicago

Address: Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago, 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago IL, 60637, U.S.A.

Tel: (773) 834-1862
Fax: (773) 834-3040
Email: slevitt@uchicago.edu
Website: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/home.html