Sendhil Mullainathan
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Sendhil Mullainathan is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT, first as a junior faculty member and then as a full Professor. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. Mullainathan received his B.A. in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Economics from Cornell University in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1998. Although he was born in a small farming village in India, Mullainathan moved to the Los Angeles area at age seven.
In a recent article published in the American Economic Review, he and co-author Marianne Bertrand tested for the existence of race-based hiring in the Boston and Chicago labor markets by sending out identical résumés to employers, half with traditionally African American names and the other half with traditionally Caucasian names. They observe a 50 percent difference in call-back rates between the two samples.
Another paper with co-authors (Marianne Bertrand, Dean Karlan, Eldar Shafir and Jon Zinman) shows small psychological factors can have large effects even in big decisions. They send out letters offering a loan to clients of a bank in South Africa. These letters are randomly varied to include or not small psychologically important changes, such as including a female photo or not. They find that these small changes can have the same impact on take-up of the loan as dropping the interest rate by 2 to 5 percentage points. These large effects raise serious questions about what really drives decisions and whether the economic model is a good approximation.
