David Rothschild, Ph.D.David Rothschild is an economist at Yahoo! Research. He has a Ph.D. in applied economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation is in creating aggregated forecasts from individual-level information. He has written extensively, in both the academic and popular press, on polling, prediction markets, and predictions of upcoming events. He has academic papers that cover the following interest areas: political economy, behavior economics/public opinion, public economics/public policy, industrial organization, and experimental economics. On The Signal he will be blogging about economics and politics, overseeing all of the prediction and sentiment models, and coordinating with a vast team the creation of prediction games for you to play!
Education
2006-2011 (graduate): University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business … Ph.D. in Applied Economics (Business and Public Policy Department)
1998-2002 (undergraduate): Brown University … Sc.B. (B.S.) in Civil Engineering and B.A. in History
A few academic papers that may be of interest to readers of The Signal:
Forecasting Elections: Comparing Prediction Markets, Polls, and their Biases: Using the 2008 elections, I explore the accuracy and informational content of forecasts derived from two different types of data: polls and prediction markets.
Forecasting Elections: Comparing Prediction Markets, Polls, and their Biases: (with Justin Wolfers): In this paper, we explore the value of an underutilized political polling question: who do you think will win the upcoming election? The Signal will not just report the most efficient forecasts from available data, but we are working on experimental polling and prediction markets as well to create even more efficient data.