Biography
Dr. Kapteyn is an economics professor and founding director of the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research. Prior to USC, he was a senior economist and director of Labor and Population at RAND. At RAND, he led research teams on dozens of projects analyzing various topics, such as successful financial planning, how much Americans know about Social Security and comparing life satisfaction in the United States and the Netherlands. He was also director of the Roybal Center for Financial Decision Making and associate director of the Financial Literacy Center, a joint center of RAND, Dartmouth College, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are applied welfare economics, preference formation, household decision making, leisure and labor supply, econometrics of panel data, latent variables, variance components, consumer demand, savings, aging, and retirement.
Before joining RAND, Kapteyn held a chair in econometrics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where he served in numerous capacities, including dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, founder and director of CentER (a research institute and graduate school) and of CentERdata (a survey research institute), and director of CentER Applied Research (a contract research institute). He has held visiting positions at several universities, including Princeton University, the California Institute of Technology, Australian National University, the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), the University of Bristol (England), and USC, where he was assistant and then associate professor of economics from 1979 to 1982. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Leiden University, in The Netherlands in 1977. His research expertise covers microeconomics, public finance and econometrics, the application of mathematics and statistical methods to economic data.