**Summary:** Social interactions models represent an effort by economists to integrate substantive ideas from sociology into the formalism of economic analysis. In this talk I will give an overview of some theoretical models of social interactions as well as discuss some of the statistical challenges that exist in distinguishing social determinants of behavior from other mechanisms.
Thursday, 2/28/2019
11:00am-12:20pm
Kent 120
A light lunch will be provided by Papa John's.
**Steven Durlauf** is the Steans Professor in Educational Policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Prior to this appointment, he was William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2011, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is co-director of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group, an international research network linking scholars across disciplines in the study of inequality and the sources of human flourishing and destitution. Durlauf is the current Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature.
Durlauf's research spans many topics in microeconomics and macroeconomics. His most important substantive contributions involve the areas of poverty, inequality and economic growth. Much of his research has attempted to integrate sociological ideas into economic analysis. His major methodological contributions include both economic theory and econometrics. He helped pioneer the application of statistical mechanics techniques to the modelling of socioeconomic behavior and has also developed identification analyses for the empirical analogs of these models. Other research has focused on techniques for policy evaluation and the econometrics of cross country income differences.
**Suggested background:**
* [Attached in Repository: Linear Social Interactions Models.](https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/steven_durlauf/blob/master/bbdjJPE.pdf)
* [Attached in Repository: Identification of Social Interactions.](https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/steven_durlauf/blob/master/bbdiidentificationHSE2011.pdf)
The 2018-2019 Computational Social Science Workshop meets Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Kent 120. All interested faculty and graduate students are welcome.
Students in the Masters of Computational Social Science program are expected to attend and join the discussion by posting a comment on the issues page of the workshop's public repository on GitHub. Further instructions are documented in the Computational Social Science Workshop's README on Github.