Steven Durlauf

Steven Neil Durlauf (born August 12, 1958) is an American social scientist and economist. He is currently Steans Professor in Educational Policy and the inaugural Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Durlauf was previously the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As of 2021, is also a Part Time Professor at the New Economic School.

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 the development of techniques for policy evaluation and the construction of an econometrics of cross country income differences. Durlauf is also known as a critic of the use of the concept of social capital by social scientists and has also challenged the ways that agent-based modelling and complexity theory have been employed by social and natural scientists to study socioeconomic phenomena. Finally, Durlauf has written on issues of fairness and justice, developing normative justifications for "associational redistribution" which refers to the idea that policies such as affirmative action should be understood as redistributing various social and economic ties.