For this assignment, I conducted an interview of Professor Daniel McFadden.  Professor McFadden is an econometrician  who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2000.  But he did not seem at all intimidating during the interview.  In fact, he was rather calm and easy to talk to.

        Professor McFadden is a leader in microeconometrics and discrete choice analysis.  Microeconometrics involves using econometrics to study microeconomic issues, and discrete choice analysis is about how people make decisions when they have a discrete number of alternatives.

        For some of his projects, Professor McFadden gathers his own data.  For instance, in the 1970s, he did some work on BART ridership.  He collected data on people before BART’s inception, used discrete choice models to predict BART ridership, and then collected data on BART ridership and compared it to his predictions.

        Professor McFadden is currently doing work on aging and retirement.  He would like to find out how people plan for retirement and whether people nearing retirement age have realistic perceptions.  He is collecting data for this project by conducting a survey on the Internet.  Another goal of the project is to see how well such surveys work for gathering data.  Professor McFadden is also using a publicly-available database called the Health and Retirement Survey for this research.
When asked for advice in studying economics, Professor McFadden stressed the importance of having a strong background in mathematics.  But he said that certain fields of mathematics (like topology and real analysis) are more useful in economics than others (like abstract algebra and combinatorics).

    Professor McFadden joked that he is relieved that his colleague Professor Akerlof recently won the Nobel Prize, since a lot of the extra attention Professor McFadden has been getting recently might now get diverted away from him and towards Professor Akerlof.