Michael Hurd

Senior Principal Researcher
RAND Corporation

Michael Hurd received a Masters Degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.  He is Principal Senior Researcher and Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging. He has published papers on a wide range of topics in the economics of aging including the structure of private pensions and Social Security and their effects on retirement decisions, the economic status of the elderly, the determinants of consumption and saving (particularly mortality risk), the use of health care services, methods of assessing uncertainty in a population; bracketing and anchoring effects in the elicitation of economic information; and the relationship between socioeconomic status and mortality.  He served on the Technical Panel of Experts (1990) and the Panel of Experts (1991) to the Social Security Advisory Council; on the Advisory Committee for the World Bank Old-Age Security Study; on the Panel on Retirement Income Modeling, Committee on National Statistics, National Research Council, 1995-1996; on the Panel on Access to Research Data, Committee on National Statistics, National Research Council, 2003-2005; and on the Panel on Measuring Food Insecurity and Hunger, Committee on National Statistics, National Research Council, 2004-2006.  He has had extensive experience in survey methods and design:  He is a Co-PI of the Health and Retirement Study where he has responsibility for the economics content of the survey.  He is a consultant to the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and to the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe.  He is Co-PI of a joint project with the University of Michigan on Internet surveying.  Hurd is the Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging.  He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow of Netspar (Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement) in the Netherlands.  He is a Research Professor at the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Netzwerk Alternsforschung  (Network Aging Research) at the University of Heidelberg, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Oxford Institute of Ageing at Oxford University.  He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Population Ageing, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Western Economic Association International.

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