Featured Researcher: Arie Kapteyn

Arie Kapteyn is Professor of Economics and the founding Executive Director of the Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California. 

Prior to his appointment at USC in 2012, Kapteyn was a Senior Economist and Director of the Labor & Population division of the RAND Corporation. Before joining RAND in 2001, Kapteyn held a chair in econometrics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where he was also dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and founder and director of CentER (a research institute and graduate school) and of CentERdata (a survey research institute). He has held visiting positions at Princeton University, the California Institute of Technology, Australian National University, the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and the University of Bristol, U.K. In 2006, he received a knighthood in the order of the Netherlands Lion.

Kapteyn is a fellow of the Econometric Society, past president of the European Society for Population Economics, and corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received an M.A. in econometrics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, an M.A. in agricultural economics from Wageningen University, and a Ph.D. from Leiden University, all in the Netherlands. 

Much of Professor Kapteyn's recent research is in the field of aging and economic decision making, with papers on topics related to retirement, consumption and savings, pensions and Social Security, disability, economic well-being of the elderly, and portfolio choice. He currently leads projects on several topics, including the measurement and explanation of subjective well-being, the analysis of health and economic determinants of retirement in the U.S. and Western Europe, and a center on the analysis of economic decision making related to retirement and saving and investing for retirement. He is a pioneer in the design and organization of probability Internet panels (where respondents without prior Internet are provided with Internet connections and the required hardware). He was the founding director of the CentERpanel in the Netherlands, the oldest existing probability Internet panel in the world. While at RAND he founded the American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of 6000 households. Since he joined USC he founded yet another Internet panel: the Understanding America Study, which currently covers about 2,000 households. He generally has a strong interest in the use of new technology to improve data collection in the social sciences.

In his free time, Kapteyn likes to ride his bike - a decidedly less new technology.