UChicago Professor Awarded Nobel in Economics

Thanks to Senior Team Harris member Peter Biava (MPP/MBA 19) for this post! 

Today is an incredibly proud day for the University of Chicago community. Richard Thaler, the Charles R. Walgreen distinguished service professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at Chicago Booth, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to the field of Behavioral Economics. If that’s a mouthful, or if you’re unfamiliar with Professor Thaler’s academic work, you may be familiar with his best-selling book, Nudge, which he co-wrote with Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein.

With today’s award, Professor Thaler joins an elite group of peers: he is one of ninety Nobel Prize winners to be associated with the University of Chicago, five of whom are economics professors that are currently still teaching on campus: Eugene Fama, Lars Hansen, Roger Myerson, James Heckman, and Robert E. Lucas Jr. Profs Heckman and Myerson are professors at Harris Public Policy! There was a ceremony on campus today to celebrate Professor Thaler’s award, in attendance were his fellow UChicago Nobel Laureates, and many members of the UChicago student community.

What does this mean to me as a student? It’s humbling and amazing to think that I’m on campus here at UChicago where groundbreaking research is being conducted every single day. It makes me feel good that I’ve chosen the Harris School for its stance on data and evidence-based policy. 

If you’re a fan of Behavioral Economics, there are plenty of ways to get involved at Harris. For starters, there is a Behavioral Economics student club that plans lunches where professors come in to speak about their research in behavior modification. If you still have more of an appetite for B.E. but you don’t have the time to take Thaler’s PhD course at Booth, Harris’ very own Professor Kimberly Wolske teaches a course called “Psychology for Policy Designers”. I took this course last spring and found it incredibly enriching; it helped me better understand the kinds of biases and frictions that our brains naturally experience when we’re encountered with new information. This course will certainly help me become a better policymaker now that I’m aware of these biases, as I can structure my policy communication and messaging in a way that will be more easily understood and received by the general public.

After the spring, I felt that just one course on behavioral economics wasn’t enough so I signed up to be a Research Assistant with a Behavioral Economics experiment that was being conducted through the Becker Friedman Institute. The experiment was in the field at an urban Chicago grocery store, and we collected the store’s sales data to determine whether the treatments (signage encouraging healthy eating habits), free samples (sliced fruit and veggies), or an interaction of the two had any statistically significant impact on customer’s purchasing behavior. This experiment fell into the same category as Professor Thaler’s Nudge, in that the experiment did not change the choice set or the costs associated with those choices, but simply nudged individuals to make healthier choices in their grocery shopping! The data is still being collected on this experiment, but it was interesting to get involved with research that could potentially inform health policy in the future.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a brief quote that Professor Thaler used in his speech at today’s ceremony:  “In order to do good economics you have to keep in mind that people are human.” This might be a tongue-in-cheek remark from Prof. Thaler, but I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this too. It’s an incredible reminder for all policymakers to remember that data is more than just numbers: it represents real people with real lives. That’s why everyone at Harris works so hard to get the data right, because it has real-world impact and real outcomes.