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Last modified: Friday, March 20, 2009

Pravin K. Trivedi

Distinguished Professor

J. H. Rudy Professor of Economics
Department of Economics
College of Arts and Sciences
University Graduate School
Indiana University Bloomington
Appointed to IU Faculty, 1987
B.Sc., London School of Economics, 1965
M.Sc., London School of Economics, 1966
Ph.D. University of London, 1970

Pravin Trivedi is internationally known as an academic leader in the field of econometrics. His colleagues say he has "contributed to virtually every important aspect of econometrics," and he has "shaped the direction of microeconometrics research."

Pravin Trivedi

Pravin Trivedi

Print-Quality Photo

He is the co-author, along with A. Colin Cameron, of Microeconomics: Methods and Applications (2005), which is an essential reference for students in the field and for applied econometricians. His monograph on Regression Analysis of Count Data is the definitive work on the subject and has been cited more than 1,500 times in Google Scholar. Nobel laureate Robert F. Engle writes that this monograph "has really defined the field of count data for cross sectional and micro-econometric model building."

After earning his degrees at the London School of Economics and the University of London, Trivedi has held academic appointments on three continents. He taught at the University College London and the University of Southampton before moving to Australian National University in 1974. He taught there until he joined the IU faculty in 1987. He is the author of a large body of published works, including six books and more than 75 articles in refereed journals and volumes.

Since coming to Indiana University, Trivedi has focused on health economics and econometrics, specifically the ways in which health insurance influences peoples' use of health care services. "Pravin's great strength as an econometrician is that he can take problems encountered in substantive research and develop econometric methods to address these problems," say his colleagues J. Scott Long, IU Chancellor's Professor of Sociology and Statistics, and Fwu-Ranq Chang, professor of economics. His research, they note, "has provided great insights into the national debate on health insurance and health care utilization."

While receiving many awards and honors, Trivedi has been invited to lecture throughout the world. In recent years he been recognized as a Distinguished Author by the Journal of Applied Economics, invited as a master lecturer to the Marie Curie Training Programme in Applied Health Economics in Greece, awarded the Jean Monnet Research Fellowship at the European Research Institute in Florence, Italy, and made a fellow of the Journal of Econometrics. He has been a consultant, fellow, and research committee member for the World Bank. He has received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, the American Statistical Association, and the National Institutes of Health.

In addition, Trivedi is or has been on the editorial boards of multiple scholarly journals, including Foundations and Trends in Econometrics, the Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Econometrics Journal, and the Review of Economic Studies. He is also an active member of a number of economic and econometric professional associations, including the Advisory Board of Health, Econometrics, and Data Group at York University. He founded the Midwest Econometrics Group in 1994.

Trivedi is also highly regarded for his teaching and mentoring of graduate students. Through the years he has taken on an unusually large number of Ph.D. students, and many have established successful academic careers of their own. "He has been and continues to be one of the profession's most successful graduate trainers and this is a valuable, and sometimes underrated service," says Tony Lancaster, professor emeritus of economics at Brown University. He was awarded the Indiana University Trustees' Teaching Award in 2001.

Professor Trivedi is praised by his colleagues for his remarkably broad accomplishments in the field. "Pravin is almost unique in the economics profession for his vast range of subjects on which he has published important and path-breaking contributions," writes David Hendry of Oxford University. He concludes that Trivedi's published work "constitutes a major contribution to the quantitative understanding of economic behaviour."