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Sendhil Mullainathan Named Professor of Economics at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - July 7, 2004 - Sendhil Mullainathan, an internationally recognized expert on behavioral economics, corporate finance, development economics, and applied microeconomics, has been named professor of economics at Harvard University, Dean William C. Kirby of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced today. Mullainathan will join the Harvard faculty during the 2004-05 academic year.
Mullainathan, 32, is currently Mark Hyman Jr. Career Development Associate Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Sendhil Mullainathan has made pathbreaking contributions to each of his fields of study, and will be a wonderful addition to the body of Harvard researchers working at the interface of psychology and economics," said Kirby, the Edith and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of History. "He has also earned a reputation as an outstanding teacher. I am delighted that he will be joining us."
Mullainathan's research interests are wide-ranging, including the setting of wages, executive compensation, racial discrimination in the labor market, public policy and social structure in developing nations, and behavioral economics of the poor. The Corporate Governance Library judged one of his papers, titled "Do CEOs Set Their Own Pay? The Ones Without Principals Do," to be the best written in 2000.
Mullainathan earned a B.A. in computer science, economics, and mathematics from Cornell University in 1993, followed by a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1998. He joined the MIT faculty that year, and was named in 2002 to the position he now holds.
Mullainathan is currently a MacArthur Fellow, having received a five-year "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2002. He has served as a referee for numerous economics journals, as a faculty research fellow and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and as a member of the Behavioral Economics Roundtable at the Russell Sage Foundation.
Other honors include student recognition as an Outstanding Faculty Member in the MIT economics department in 2000. Mullainathan has also served in recent years as an Olin Foundation Fellow, a Zvi Griliches National Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Sloan Foundation Fellow. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Citicorp, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Compensation Association.
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