Michael Patrick Keane (born 1961) is an American-born economist; he is the Wm. Polk Carey Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Keane was previously a professor at the University of New South Wales and the Nuffield Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. He is considered one of the world's leading experts in the fields of Choice Modelling, structural modelling, simulation estimation, and panel data econometrics.
He is also one of the world's leading economists by many measures of research productivity. Keane works in numerous areas including labor economics, econometrics, consumer demand models, marketing, industrial organization, health economics, and trade.
He is currently a chief investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (Cepar). From 2006–10 he was Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Choice (CenSoC) at UTS. Keane became a dual citizen of Australia in 2010.
Education and career
Keane was born in Suffern, New York, United States in 1961. He and graduated from Xavier High School in Manhattan in 1979. Keane received a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983, and a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1990.
In 1993, he became a tenured associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and was promoted to full professor in 1996. He subsequently held full professor positions at New York University (1998–2001) and Yale University (2000-2006).
In 2006, he moved to Australia to take up an Australian Federation Fellowship at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2011, he became an Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of New South Wales.
Keane was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society (2005), to the Council of the Econometric Society (2009), and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (2012). He was the recipient of the John D.C. Little award for the Best Paper in Marketing (1996) and the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in Health Economics (2008). In 2004–05, Keane was the Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University and, subsequently, has been a regular visiting professor there.
Contributions
Keane's work is notable for the fact that it spans a very wide range of substantive and methodological areas. He is best known for work on the following topics:
Discrete choice models
Keane's work on recursive importance sampling (the "GHK" algorithm), contained in his thesis (1990) and published in 1993–1994, made it feasible to estimate a much larger class of discrete choice models than was previously possible. In particular, his thesis developed a fast algorithm for the highly accurate calculation of areas of polyhedrons in very-high-dimensional spaces. While primarily a result in applied mathematics, this result is very useful in economics (and other social sciences) because the choice probabilities in discrete choice models generally have this form. The GHK algorithm is now included in many popular econometrics software packages, including SAS, Stata, GAUSSX, Matlab and R-Cran-Bayesm, and is a standard topic in graduate econometrics texts.
Consumer demand and marketing
A 1996 paper with Tulin Erdem in Marketing Science presented what is now the main economic model of advertising and consumer learning. This paper received the John D.C. Little Award for the Best Paper in Marketing in 1996, and it has had a major impact on the fields of marketing and industrial organization. There is now a large literature on consumer learning based on the Erdem-Keane framework. Erdem and Keane (among others) have argued that their framework can provide an economic explanation for the phenomenon known as brand equity, based on incomplete information and risk aversion. The November 2013 issue of Marketing Science contains an extensive review of the large literature based on the Erdem-Keane framework.