Susan Athey

About

Professor Susan Athey is The Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a PhD from Stanford University, and she also holds an honorary doctorate from Duke University. Her research focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of machine learning and econometrics. She has studied a range of application areas including timber auctions, online advertising, the news media, labor market transitions, health, and digital technology for social impact. Professor Athey has served as a consulting chief economist for Microsoft Corporation for six years and has been involved with multiple private and public technology firms' boards. She was a founding associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and is the founding director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB. Her career includes academic appointments at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, and she has received numerous awards and honors such as the John Bates Clark Medal, the R.K. Cho Economics Prize, and election to the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as the 2023 President of the American Economics Association and has been actively involved in professional service roles, including editorial positions and committee memberships.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Internal medicine
• Data science
• Management science
• Virology
• Microeconomics
• Economics

Selected publications

• Falling living standards during the COVID-19 crisis: Quantitative evidence from nine developing countries

  Science Advances · 2021 · 472 citations

  Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from over 30,000 respondents in 16 original household surveys from nine countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone), Asia (Banglad…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities

  Science · 2020 · 413 citations

  Data sharing, research ethics, and incentives must improve

  DOI

• Integrating explanation and prediction in computational social science

  Nature · 2021 · 357 citations

  DOI

• Preventing cytokine storm syndrome in COVID-19 using α-1 adrenergic receptor antagonists

  Journal of Clinical Investigation · 2020 · 120 citations

  Dysregulated host immune responses drive mortality in pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by a wide range of infections. In coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) elicits an exuberant local or systemic immune response (hyperinflammation) in the lung and other sites of viral replication, compromising organ function and leading to high morbidity and mortality (1-4).

  DOI

• On synthetic difference-in-differences and related estimation methods in Stata

  The Stata Journal Promoting communications on statistics and Stata · 2024-12-01 · 62 citations

  articleOpen access

  In this article, we describe a computational implementation of the synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) estimator of Arkhangelsky et al. (2021, American Economic Review 111: 4088-4118) for Stata. SDID can be used in many circumstances where treatment effects on some particular policy or event are desired and repeated observations on treated and untreated units are available over time. We lay out the theory underlying SDID both when there is a single treatment adoption date and when adoptio…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Comparative Statics: Theory and an Empirical Framework for Testing Predictions

  NSF · $160k · 1996–1999

• Private Information in Dynamic Games

  NSF · $226k · 2004–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Guido W. Imbens

  Stanford University

  222 shared

• Patrick J. Kehoe

  81 shared

• Andrew Atkeson

  University of California, Los Angeles

  75 shared

• Stefan Wager

  64 shared

• Alberto Abadie

  49 shared

• Jeffrey M. Wooldridge

  Michigan State University

  48 shared

• Jonathan Levin

  RAND Corporation

  44 shared

• Michael Luca

  William Carey University

  34 shared

Education

• PhD, Graduate School of Business

  Stanford University

  1995

Awards & honors

• R. K. Cho Economics Prize (2024)
• Honorary degree, London Business School (2022)
• Adam Smith Award, National Association of Business Economist…
• CME Group-Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Prize in…
• R. Michael and Mary Shanahan Faculty Fellow for 2020–21

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