Executive Director, Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research 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. 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.