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Contact Information:
Yale School of Management
135 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06510
(203) 432-6049 (office)
(203) 432-6974 (fax)
keith.chen@yale.edu |
Office hours:
Thursdays, 3:00 to 4:30
Assistant:
Mary Ellen Nichols
(203) 432-3955 (office)
maryellen.nichols@yale.edu |
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Keith Chen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management. His research blurs traditional boundaries in both subject and methodology, bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of Economics, Psychology, and Biology. In an early project he measured what ex-prisoners lives would have looked like had prison conditions been more or less harsh. In work examining the economic behavior of monkeys, he has shown that monkeys display many of the hallmark biases of human behavior, suggesting that some of our most fundamental biases are evolutionarily ancient. Professor Chen's most recent work focuses on how people's economic choices and attitudes are influenced by their language.
Research Interests:
Primary Fields:
Behavioral Economics and Applied Microeconomics.
Teaching:
Behavioral Economics
and Microeconomic Theory.
See a research statement about my work.
Most
Recent Papers:
The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets
This Draft: January 2012
Revise and resubmit: American Economic Review
You can read about this paper in these recent articles:
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Obese? Smoker? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It's Because of the Language You Speak
Big Think, Febuary 5th, 2012
Synopsis:
Why can't the Greeks be more like the Germans? Could it be because they speak Greek?... |
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Speaking and Saving
Yale Alumni Magazine, January, 2012
Synopsis:
Want to end the various global debt crises? Try abandoning English, Greek, and Italian in favor of German, Finnish, and Korean. “People whose languages force them to speak differently about the future than the present tend to save less,” says behavioral economist Keith Chen, an associate professor at the School of Management... |
Are Women Overinvesting in Education? Evidence from the Medical Profession
This Draft: December, 2011
Forthcoming: Journal of Human Capital
The Evolution of Decision-Making Under Risk: Framing Effects in Monkey Risk Preferences
Joint with Venkat Lakshminarayanan & Laurie Santos
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2011
How Choice Affects and Reflects Preferences: Revisiting the Free-Choice Paradigm
Joint with Jane Risen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October 2010
You can read about this paper in a recent article:
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And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw
The New York Times, April 8th, 2008
Synopsis:
The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it's not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology... |
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