Robert Miller

Robert Miller holds the Richard M. Cyert and Morris DeGroot Professorship in Economics and Statistics, and is a Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Tepper School of Management, Carnegie Mellon University. He is a world leader in structural econometrics. His original work on job matching treated the solution to a dynamic discrete choice optimization problem (DDC) as the basis for the data generating process. It incorporates endogenous time varying unobserved heterogeneity into a Maximum Likelihood (ML) Estimator, which simultaneously solves the fixed point for a DDC while attaining a constrained optimum in the parameter space. With coauthors, he invented CCP (conditional choice probability) estimators for DDCs, finessing the individual optimization problem nested within ML; they are easy to implement and computationally fast. Miller has extended the CCP estimation to datasets with unobserved heterogeneity, and to panels where the horizon of the sampled individuals extends beyond the end of the panel. The identification of DDCs is founded on the Hotz-Miller CCP formulation, a literature to which Miller has also contributed. In addition, he pioneered the application of structural econometrics beyond DDCs to large data sets where social behavior is as an equilibrium probability distribution derived from a dynamic multi-agent model. His empirical work encompasses a wide range of economic settings, including the labor market, fertility, housing, executive compensation, financial markets and auctions. Miller’s publications are widely cited; he frequently presents his research at seminars and conferences; he mainly publishes in the top economics journals, but also in accounting and finance; he regularly gives invited lectures on his work throughout the world. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and of the International Association of Applied Econometrics. Miller consults on labor issues, and he has served as an expert witness in several lawsuits. At Carnegie Mellon, Professor Miller teaches MBA courses he developed in strategic corporate management, and trade and investment strategy, along with doctoral courses in advanced econometrics.