Richard Thaler

@Nobel Prize Winner in Economics (2017), Facts and Facts

Richard Thaler is an American economist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017

Sep 12, 1945

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Biography

Personal Details

  • Birthday: September 12, 1945
  • Nationality: American
  • Famous: Nobel Prize Winner in Economics (2017), Intellectuals & Academics, Economists
  • City/State: New Jersey
  • Spouses: France Leclerc
  • Known as: Richard H. Thaler
  • Universities:
    • Case Western Reserve University
    • University of Rochester
    • Newark Academy

Richard Thaler born at

East Orange, New Jersey, United States

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Birth Place

Richard Thaler spent the academic year 1994-95 as a visiting professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management so that he could spend time with France Leclerc, a faculty there in the marketing department. That year they both joined the then University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and later the two also got married.

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Personal Life

Leclerc is his second wife, and he has three children. His wife later left her teaching job and now identifies herself as a traveler, a photographer and a storyteller, who travels around the world documenting different cultures.

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Personal Life

He was an informal adviser to President Barack Obama's administration as well as his re-election campaign in 2012. He was also a formal adviser to the "Behavioural Insight Team" in Prime Minister David Cameron's administration in the United Kingdom.

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Personal Life

Richard H. Thaler was born on September 12, 1945 in East Orange, New Jersey, to Alan M. Thaler and Roslyn (Melnikoff). He was born into a Jewish family and grew up with two younger brothers.

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Childhood & Early Life

His father was an actuary at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey, while his mother was a school teacher turned stay-at-home-mom. His father wanted him to be an actuary like him, but he had decided early in his life not to be a businessman.

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Childhood & Early Life

In 1967, he completed his graduation from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland with a degree in economics. He was initially interested in psychology, but settled on the more “practical” choice economics as it was easier to get jobs in this field.

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Childhood & Early Life

After college, he attended the University of Rochester in New York, from where he earned his master’s degree in 1970. He also completed his Ph.D. in 1974 from there.

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Childhood & Early Life

After completing his studies from the University of Rochester, Richard Thaler began his career as a professor there. From 1978 to 1995, he was a faculty at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University and then shifted again to University of Chicago's Booth School of Business in 1995.

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Career

From 1987 to 1990, he regularly published the column titled 'Anomalies' in the 'Journal of Economic Perspectives', which earned him widespread attention in the field of economics. Through his extensive research, he aimed to record various separate instances of economic behavior that were in apparent violation of traditional microeconomic theory.

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Career

In 1992, he combined many of his 'Anomalies' columns from the 'Journal of Economic Perspectives' into the book, 'The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life'. The book, which adapted the contents of his columns for a popular audience, challenges the conventional economic theories by revealing the paradoxical nature of people's actual economic behaviors.

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Career

One of the earliest advocates of behavioral economics, he provided a standard reference to this new approach in finance via his 1993 book ‘Advances in Behavioral Finance’. He stated that the new approach in finance “entertains the possibility that some agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time”. In 2005, he published an updated version of the book, titled 'Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II (Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics)'.

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Career

In 1994, he released another book, ‘Quasi Rational Economics’, in which he questioned why standard economic models often fail to predict market behavior accurately. He stated that the failure is due to the unwillingness to take into account the biases that color human judgments.

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Career

Richard Thaler's 2008 book 'Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness' with Cass Sunstein is one of his best known works in the field of behavioral economics. The book was received by largely positive reviews and was named one of the best books of 2008 by 'The Economist'.

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Major Works