12 Facts About Steven Levitt

Steven David Levitt was born on May 29,1967 and is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels.

Steven Levitt was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007.

In 2009, Levitt co-founded TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company.

Steven Levitt was chosen as one of Time magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World" in 2006.

Steven Levitt attended St Paul Academy and Summit School in St Paul, Minnesota.

Steven Levitt received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1994.

Steven Levitt is currently the William B Ogden Distinguished Service Professor and the director of Gary Becker Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.

Steven Levitt has published over 60 academic publications, studying topics including crime, politics and sports, through the framework of economics.

Steven Levitt's most well-known and controversial paper posits that the legalization of abortion in the US in 1973 was a major causal factor in the considerable reduction in crime that followed approximately eighteen years later.

Revisiting a question first studied empirically in the 1960s, Donohue and Steven Levitt argued that the legalization of abortion could account for almost half of the reduction in crime witnessed in the 1990s.

In November 2005, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economist Christopher Foote and his research assistant Christopher Goetz, published a paper, in which they argued that the results in Donohue and Steven Levitt's paper were due to statistical errors made by the authors.

In January 2006, Donohue and Steven Levitt published a response, in which they admitted the errors in their original paper, but pointed out that Foote and Goetz's correction was flawed due to heavy attenuation bias.