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Faculty

Angus Deaton

Presidential Scholar

Headshot of Sir Angus Deaton

Biography

Professor Sir Angus Deaton is a Presidential Professor of Economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a Distinguished Fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center. He is also a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His main current research areas are in poverty, inequality, health, wellbeing, economic development, and randomized controlled trials.

He holds both American and British citizenship. In Britain, he taught at Cambridge University and the University of Bristol. He is a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and, in 1978, was the first recipient of the Society’s Frisch Medal. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2009. In 2012, he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In April 2014, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences on April 28, 2015. He was the recipient of the 2015 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In 2016, he was made a Knight Bachelor for his services to economics and international affairs.

His current research focuses on the determinants of health in rich and poor countries, as well as on the measurement of poverty and inequality in the US, India and around the world. He also maintains a long-standing interest in the analysis of household surveys. He is also interested in what randomized controlled trials can and cannot do.