Academic Areas Econometrics and Statistics Faculty and Research

Chicago Booth is a community that is full of analytical thinkers who believe data leads to discoveries.

In our econometrics and statistics academic area, Booth faculty teach students how to analyze business and economic problems by leveraging vast amounts of data using economic, mathematical, and computer techniques.

Our faculty members’ groundbreaking research in this area covers a broad spectrum—from the uses of high-dimensional data and methods in economics applications to the development of robust forecast evaluation methodologies. Some of this research has led to our faculty winning prestigious awards: Dacheng Xiu was awarded the 2018 AQR Insight Award; Ruey S. Tsay won John Wiley and Sons Author of the Year for his book Analysis of Financial Time Series; Tengyuan Liang and Veronika Rockova are recipients of NSF CAREER awards; Max Farrell was the winner of Political Methodology’s Best Statistical Software Award; and Panagiotis Toulis was the recipient of the LinkedIn Economic Graph Challenge award.

Econometrics and statistics professors at Booth are regularly published in top journals, including American Economic Review; Annals of Statistics; Biometrika; Econometrica; Journal of the American Statistical Association; Journal of Machine Learning Research; Journal of Political Economy; Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B; and Review of Economic Studies.

Some faculty in this area are also active at a number of top machine learning conferences, including COLT, NeurIPS, AISTATS, and ICML. Many are active in organizations and initiatives, including in the American Statistical Association and the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics’ Big Data Initiative.

Econometrics and Statistics Faculty

Booth is home to preeminent scholars of econometrics and statistics, who regularly incorporate their research into the classroom.

Courses such as Big Data teach students how to model and interpret complicated datasets by leveraging a number of techniques, including linear and logistic regression, model choice and false discovery rates, and multinomial and binary regression, among others. In other courses such as Machine Learning, students learn how machine learning can be used to create value and provide insights from data. In this course, students learn about decision trees, nearest neighbor classifiers, boosting, random forests, deep neural networks, naive Bayes, and support-vector machines.

Other courses such as Analysis of Financial Time Series leverage real-world examples to teach students to analyze financial and macroeconomic data, while Statistical Insight into Marketing, Consulting, and Entrepreneurship leverages econometrics to give future consultants and entrepreneurs important tools and methodologies they can leverage in their careers.

Discover more about our econometrics and statistics faculty, including the classes they teach, below.

Featured Research in Chicago Booth Review

Discover some of the latest research from our econometrics and statistics professors.

Awards and Honors

Veronika Rockova

Veronika Rockova

Winner of the 2024 Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies for her outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics.

Veronika Rockova

Our MBA Concentrations in This Area

Our PhD Dissertation Areas in This Area

Partnering across the University of Chicago and Beyond

Our econometrics and statistics faculty members are active in and outside of the University of Chicago.

Max Farrell, Christian B. Hansen, Tetsuya Kaji, Mladen Kolar, Tengyuan Liang, Veronika Rockova, and Panos Toulis are each UChicago Scholars at the Becker Friedman Institute’s Big Data Initiative, which uses consumer and business data to improve decision-making. Jeffrey R. Russell is an associate editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. Ruey S. Tsay is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Royal Statistical Society, and Academia Sinica.

Research Centers in This Area

Research centers across Booth and the University of Chicago are hubs for innovation and world-changing research. The centers provide our faculty with research support, and our faculty members lend their expertise to the centers, enriching the student experience and the broader academic community at Booth.