Daniel McFadden

Daniel Little McFadden ( born July 29, 1937 in Raleigh, North Carolina) is an American econometricians.

McFadden received in 2000 along with James Heckman the Prize in Economic Sciences the Bank of Sweden in memory of Alfred Nobel for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choices. One example is the logit regression model. Discrete decisions are characterized by a limited number of ways. While classical econometrics can examine, for example, how many hours an individual works, can be estimated with logit regressions if it works or not. With his theories choices and behavior in road traffic can be explained plausibly.

One of the first major empirical applications of the logit model was McFadden's study on the introduction of the BART in San Francisco mid-1970s.

McFadden received a B. S. in physics and a doctorate in behavioral sciences from the University of Minnesota, where Leonid Hurwicz was one of his teachers. Starting in 1964, McFadden worked at the University of California, Berkeley, at the to 1979 he held a professorship in economics in 1969. From 1977 to 1991 he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (Massachusetts ). Since 1991 he is again a professor at Berkeley with an emphasis on computational statistics and director of the Econometrics Laboratory.