1 Griliches Fellow

Sendhil Mullainathan, an NBER Faculty Research Fellow in the Labor Studies and Corporate Finance Programs and the Mark Hyman, Jr. Career Development Associate Professor of economics at MIT, has been selected to receive the first Zvi Griliches Fellowship at the NBER for the academic year 2000/1. This fellowship, which will be awarded every two years, was created and funded by friends and colleagues of Professor Griliches to honor his memory and his tradition of mentoring young empirical economists.

Mullainathan plans to spend the coming year working on the financial behavior of firms in developing countries and on psychology and economics. In development and finance, he will empirically explore whether elusive phenomena such as transparency and tunneling can be reliably measured and, if so, test whether various policy changes have affected their prevalence. In psychology and economics, he will explore a model of "categorical thinking," in which information is processed only coarsely and where decisionmakers categorize the objects of inference (workers, firms, and so on) into broad units rather than making fine distinctions between them. He will also test this model's empirical implications for asset pricing and discrimination in labor markets.

Mullainathan received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1993 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1998. He has been at the economics department at MIT since 1998.