Matthew Harding

Biography

Matthew Harding, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics and Statistics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 2016. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. Prior to joining UC Irvine, Harding held faculty positions at Stanford University (2007-2014) and Duke University (2014-2016), where he served as Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics and helped establish the Duke-UNC USDA Center for Behavioral Economics and Healthy Food Choice Research and the Duke Energy Data Analytics Lab.

Harding's research spans econometrics, machine learning, and applied economics, with particular focus on panel data methods, Bayesian approaches, and quantile regression. His work integrates econometric techniques with machine learning to address problems in energy economics and policy, including household response to time-varying electricity pricing, behavioral demand response programs, and the economics of AI's impact on energy markets. He has also contributed to health economics research on food assistance programs, nutrition policy, and mortality prediction. Harding has published extensively in journals including the Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, and Health Affairs.

Harding is co-author of the textbook Modern Business Analytics: Practical Data Science for Decision-Making (McGraw-Hill, 2022). He serves as Associate Editor for PNAS Nexus and the Journal of Economic and Business Statistics, and has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, USDA, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation totaling over $4 million. He has taught short courses on machine learning and big data methods at central banks and universities internationally, and has advised 18 Ph.D. students who have been placed at institutions including Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Federal Reserve Board, and technology companies.

Education

• Ph.D. in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007
• M.Phil. in Economics, University of Oxford, Merton College, 2002
• B.A. in Economics and Philosophy, University College London, 2000

Distinctions

• Senior Fellow, Rimini Center for Economic Analysis, Italy, 2020
• UCI Noyce Initiative Faculty Fellow, 2021-2022
• Klaus Liebscher Economic Research Scholarship, Central Bank of Austria, 2020
• Wiley Top Cited Article, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2020-2021
• Russell Sage Summer Behavioral Institute Fellowship, 2004
• US Chamber of Commerce Data Driven Innovation Fellow, 2014
• Durham Children's Data Center, Core Faculty, 2015-2016
• Faculty Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, 2008-2014
• UCI Faculty Innovation Fellow, UCI Beall Applied Innovation, 2021-2022
• Sanford Innovation and Impact Fund Award for The State of Food Assistance in the USA, 2015