Steven N. Durlauf is Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.
Durlauf received a BA in economics from Harvard in 1980 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2011, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Durlauf served as Economics Program Director of the Santa Fe Institute from 1996-1998. He was general editor of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, revised edition, published in 2008. He is currently a co-director of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group at the University of Chicago, which is an international research network linking scholars across disciplines in the study of inequality and the sources of human flourishing and destitution.
Durlauf's research spans a wide range of topics in microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics. His most important scholarly contributions lie in the theoretical and econometric study of social interactions and the analysis of the econometrics of economics growth. He is also known as a critic of the use of the concept of social capital by economists and other social scientists and has also has challenged the ways that agent-based modelling and complexity theory have been employed social and natural scientists to study socioeconomic phenomena.Continue Reading »
