Johnson School at Cornell University

Related Content:

DOES TELEVISION CAUSE AUTISM?
by
Michael Waldman
Johnson Graduate School of Management
Cornell University
Professor Waldman's vita

Sean Nicholson
Policy Analysis and Management
Cornell University and NBER
Sean's vita

and

Nodir Adilov
Department of Economics
Indiana University-Purdue University
Nodir's vita

Download the paper from Site 1 or Site 2

Michael Waldman
Michael Waldman received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from MIT in 1977 and a Ph.D. from the Economics Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. He then took his first academic job in 1983 which was as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA (in the 1982-1983 he had a post-doc position at UCLA). At UCLA he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1989. In 1991 he moved to the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University as a Full Professor of Economics. He was given the Charles H. Dyson Chair in Management in 1997. Professor Waldman has also visited Yale's School of Organization and Management and Chicago's Graduate School of Business where he was the John M. Olin Visiting Professor during the 1997-98 academic year.

Professor Waldman's main research area is applied microeconomic theory, where his main fields of interest are industrial organization and organizational economics. In these areas he is best known for his work on learning and signaling in labor markets, the operation of durable goods markets, and the strategic use of tying and bundling in product markets. In addition to his work in these two main areas, Professor Waldman has also conducted research on a diverse set of topics including the role of expectational shocks in business cycle fluctuations, the role of tied transfers in family and government decision making, how the theory of natural selection can explain systematic errors in decision making, the ramifications of limitedly rational behavior for market outcomes, and whether early childhood television viewing is a trigger for autism.

Professor Waldman has published in many of the top journals in economics including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Journal of Labor Economics. He is listed in both the 3rd and 4th editions of Who's Who in Economics and in various editions of Marquis Who's Who in America, Marquis Who's Who in the World, and Marquis Who's Who in Science and Engineering. Professor Waldman is currently a Co-Editor at the Journal of Economic Perspectives and an Associate Editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Sean Nicholson, Ph.D.
Sean is an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining the PAM Department in 2004, Sean was a faculty member in the Health Care Systems Department at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Sean worked for four years as a management consultant with APM and taught high school for two years before enrolling in graduate school. He received a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1986 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997. Sean is currently conducting research in four areas: the causes of autism; incentives to innovate in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry; how physicians develop their treatment styles and whether patients choose physicians based on treatment styles; and measuring the financial benefit to an employer of investing in the health of its workers. Specific research projects include: the effect of financing "windows" on biotech drug development; estimating a quality-adjusted price index for colon cancer drugs; examining whether physicians' treatment decisions are influenced by where they train and how their peers treat patients; the welfare effects of variation in physician treatment styles; and measuring the cost to employers of absences and on-the-job productivity losses due to poor health.