Daniel McFadden Biography

Daniel Little McFadden is an American economist and the co-recipient of the 2000 ‘Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences’ along with American economist James Heckman. He received the award for developing the theory and methods applied for analyzing behaviour of individuals or household called ‘discrete choice’ in comprehending the way people make choices regarding where to work, where to live, or when to marry. The fields he concentrated for his research work included economic theory, environmental economics, mathematical economics, econometrics, and health economics. He introduced the method of Conditional logit analysis that analyse the way individuals make choices among finite options to get maximum utility. An early transistorized computer and an X-ray telescope were also designed and developed by him. He took the ‘James Killian Chair in Economics’ at ‘Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ (‘MIT’) and also served as director of its ‘Statistics Research Centre’. He founded the Econometrics Laboratory at ‘University of California’, Berkeley in the early 1990s and till date serves as its director. Presently he serves the ‘University of California’, Berkeley as Professor of the Graduate School. McFadden is also associated with the ‘University of Southern California’ as Presidential Professor of Health Economics. He provides his services at the Department of Economics of ‘USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ and also at ‘USC Price School of Public Policy’ to study basic problems of the health care sector, focussing particularly at the way consumers make choices regarding health insurance and medical services. He received ‘John Bates Clark Medal’ in 1975, ‘Frisch Medal’ from ‘Econometric Society’ in 1986 and ‘Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics’ from ‘Northwestern University’ in 2000.