Daniel Little McFadden (born July 29, 1937) is an American econometrician who shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Heckman. McFadden's share of the prize was "for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice". He is the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at the University of Southern California and Professor of the Graduate School at University of California, Berkeley.

Early life and education

McFadden was born on July 29, 1937, in Raleigh, North Carolina. He attended the University of Minnesota, where he received a B.S. in Physics, and a Ph.D. in Behavioral Science (Economics) five years later (1962). While at the University of Minnesota, his graduate advisor was Leonid Hurwicz, who was awarded the Economics Nobel Prize in 2007.

Career

In 1964, McFadden joined the faculty of University of California, Berkeley, focusing his research on choice behavior and the problem of linking economic theory and measurement. In 1974, he introduced conditional logit analysis. In 1975, McFadden won the John Bates Clark Medal. In 1977, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1981, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He returned to Berkeley in 1991, founding the Econometrics Laboratory, which is devoted to statistical computation for economics applications. He remains its director. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security. He won the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics in 2020 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. In January 2011, McFadden was appointed the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at the University of Southern California (USC), which entails a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and the Price School of Public Policy.