Katherine Carman

Katherine Carman, Ph.D., is a Senior Financial Economist at OIAD. Dr. Carman’s research focuses on behavioral economics and how individuals’ beliefs, perceptions, and decision making processes affect their choices. She has conducted research on financial decision making, retirement planning, and saving and investing for over 20 years. She is an expert in survey research: designing and implementing survey data collection to answer pressing public policy questions. Her past research has also considered intrahousehold decision making and the impact of peer behavior.

Prior to the SEC, Dr. Carman was a Senior Economist and the Director of the Center for Financial and Economic Decision Making at the RAND Corporation. In this position, she oversaw research on consumer financial decision making across the organization. Her research was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and contracts from a variety of federal agencies and nonprofit organizations. Prior to that, she was an assistant professor of Economics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She has a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. Dr. Carman has co-authored peer-reviewed manuscripts in a variety of journals including PNAS: the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Risk Analysis, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Economics of Ageing, Psychology and Aging, and others.