Yale School of Management - Faculty

Associate Professor of Economics

Keith Chen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management. His research blurs traditional boundaries in both subject and methodology, bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of economics, psychology, and biology. In an early project he measured what ex-prisoners lives would have looked like had prison conditions been more or less harsh. In work examining the evolutionary origins of economic behavior, he has shown that monkeys display many of the hallmark biases of human behavior, suggesting that some of our most fundamental biases are evolutionarily ancient. Professor Chen's recent work focuses on how people's economic choices are influenced by their language. His most recent work finds that how a person's language treats the future tense appears to influence future-oriented behaviors as diverse as savings and smoking.

Selected Articles
"The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets," American Economic Review, revised and resubmitted

"Are Women Overinvesting in Education? Evidence from the Medical Profession" (with J. Chevalier), Journal of Human Capital, Summer, 2012

"How Choice Affects and Reflects Preferences: Revisiting the Free-Choice Paradigm" (with J. Risen), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October, 2010

"The Endowment Effect in Capuchin Monkeys" (with V. Lakshminarayanan and L. Santos), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, December, 2008

"Modeling a Presidential Prediction Market" (J.E. Ingersoll and E.H. Kaplan), Management Science, August, 2008

"Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-Based Approach" (with J. Shapiro), American Law and Economic Review, June, 2007

"How Basic are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin-Monkey Trading Behavior" (with V. Lakshminarayanan and L. Santos), Journal of Political Economy, June, 2006

Education
PhD Harvard University, 2003
BS Stanford University, 1998