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People at CFED
Angela Hung
Angela Hung, Director (Ph.D., Social Science, California Institute of Technology) joined RAND in 2006 as an Economist. She was previously an assistant professor of economics and public policy at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University and an affiliate of the Carnegie Mellon Center for Behavioral Decision Research. She is the principal investigator for a project for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that examines the differences between broker-dealers and investment advisers, and investors' understanding of these differences. Since joining RAND, she has also been analyzing survey data from the Health and Retirement Study and RAND's American Life Panel to study financial literacy and how it relates to investment decision-making. In one recent project funded by the Social Security Administration, she compared the performance of retirement investment strategies derived from typical investment advice given by financial advisors, from optimal portfolio choice theory, and from behavioral rules-of-thumb. Another project funded by the Social Security Administration examines workers' decisions on when to begin claiming Social Security benefits. Current projects funded by the Department of Labor investigate workers' understanding of fees and expenses related to retirement plans and mutual funds. Her research in experimental economics focuses on how individuals incorporate different kinds of information into their decision-making processes.
Arie Kapteyn
Arie Kapteyn is a Senior Economist at RAND and Director of the Labor and Population program. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, past President of the European Society for Population Economics, and Corresponding Member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he received a knighthood in the order of the Netherlands Lion.
Kapteyn's research expertise covers microeconomics, public finance, and econometrics. Much of his recent applied work is in the field of aging, with papers on topics related to retirement, consumption and savings, pensions and Social Security, disability (e.g. the joint paper with Jim Smith and Arthur van Soest in the American Economic Review on international comparison of work disability), and economic well-being of the elderly. At RAND he leads several projects, including one to incorporate Internet interviewing into the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a center on the analysis of health and economic determinants of retirement, in the U.S. and Western Europe, and a center on the analysis of economic decision making related to retirement and saving and investing for retirement. Kapteyn is the initiator of a new survey system, MMIC, which is used for large scale data collection projects in the U.S, Europe, and Asia, as well as the director of the RAND American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of about 1200 households, who are regularly interviewed over the Internet.
One of his long-standing research interests has been in the potential of new data in the social sciences. His work on Internet interviewing is one example. With two co-PIs he was recently awarded a major grant by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to set up a new high speed Internet panel in The Netherlands that is accessible to researchers from around the globe for experimentation (Measurement and Experimentation in the Social Sciences: MESS; see http://www.centerdata.nl/. Other related research activities concern the combination of survey and administrative data (Kapteyn and Ypma, 2007, Journal of Labor Economics) and methods to compare response scales on disability and health across respondents (as in Kapteyn, Smith and Van Soest in the AER, 2007).
Jeff Dominitz
Jeff Dominitz (Ph.D., Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison) joined RAND as a Senior Economist in 2006 from the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy and is currently an adjunct Economist. He has previously held faculty positions at the University of Michigan, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Southern California. While at Michigan, he was also a research fellow at the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research. While at Carnegie Mellon, he served as Research Director of the Census Research Data Center. In 1998, he co-founded Resolution Economics LLC, one of the nation's premier labor economics and statistics consulting firms, where he served as Senior Economist prior to joining Carnegie Mellon. His research focuses on the design and application of innovative methods for the collection and analysis of survey data. He has published results of his work in leading journals of economics, statistics, and survey methods. His recent publications include a paper on household expectations of mutual fund returns and portfolio choice behavior, a paper on belief updating by subjects in economic experiments, and a chapter in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics entitled “Analysis of Survey Data”. He is currently the survey director of the RAND American Life Panel.
Titus Galama
Titus Galama, Ph.D., MBA, is a Management Scientist at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica. Dr. Galama was awarded a M.Sc. in Physics in 1995 (cum laude [top 5%]) and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics in 1999 (cum laude [top 2%]) from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Two of the discoveries presented in Dr. Galama's Ph.D. thesis were considered the 5th and 10th most significant scientific discoveries of 1997 and 1999, respectively, by Science magazine. He was awarded the "Christian Huygens Award" by the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences for the most outstanding thesis in astrophysics.
After completion of his thesis he worked as a Fairchild Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, USA. There, and in Amsterdam, he operated large observational programs with a worldwide network of telescopes, organized scientific meetings and conferences, and authored over 50 scientific publications in top scientific journals.
Following his scientific career, and before joining RAND as a policy researcher, he obtained an MBA from INSEAD at the Singapore and French campuses, and subsequently joined L.E.K Consulting, a global strategy consulting firm headquartered in London, as a senior consultant in the Los Angeles office. As a senior consultant he has worked on a variety of strategy projects in healthcare, biotechnology, finance and media and entertainment technology for companies ranging from mature start-ups to global conglomerates.
His research at the RAND Corporation focuses on understanding the effect of health on the decision to retire. He has developed with Arie Kapteyn an analytical model of health, savings and retirement decisions. Analytical solutions show that health evolves towards a so called minimally productive health level. He is currently analyzing various surveys with the aim to empirically establish this new health concept and understand the potential relationship with retirement.
Joanne Yoong
Joanne Yoong is an Associate Economist at RAND and the FSI Starr Foundation Fellow at Stanford University, where she received her PhD in Economics. Prior to attending Stanford, she was a credit derivatives research analyst in the Fixed Income, Commodities and Currencies Division of Goldman Sachs in New York and London.
Her main field of research is applied microeconomics, with an emphasis on finance, health and economic development. Her previous research is largely based in India and includes studies of the impact of hospital financing on doctors' incentives to deliver child-health services (in Madhya Pradesh) and the design of micro-credit loan contracts with prepayment devices to support better long-term investments in health (in Orissa State, joint with Aprajit Mahajan and Alessandro Tarozzi).
She is also interested in the development of new empirical methods in the social sciences. Her field research included the development of new visual and game-based methods to elicit risk and time preferences as well as subjective expectations of probabilistic events from illiterate respondents. As an adjunct staff member at RAND in 2007, her work investigated the use of American Life Panel survey to address issues related to financial decisionmaking.
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