Anita Mukherjee

I am an Associate Professor of Risk and Insurance at UW-Madison's Wisconsin School of Business. My research contains two focal areas: (1) household finance, retirement, and financial literacy, and (2) public policy related to drugs and crime. My research has been published in top economics/finance journals, such as the Journal of Financial Economics and American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, as well as top field journals, such as the Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Risk and Insurance, and Journal of Law and Economics. I am an Editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance. In 2024, I was the recipient of the Early Career Scholarly Achievement Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association.

I am a fellow of the TIAA Institute, a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (Insurance Initiative), and a member of the G53 Financial Literacy and Personal Finance Research Network. I am also actively engaged with a number of social science units on campus, including the Center for Financial Security Retirement and Disability Research Center, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. I am an affiliated faculty at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Outside of campus, I am a member of the Risk Theory Society and the Justice Tech Lab. I have previously co-edited a special issue on Financing Longevity for The Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

I earned my Ph.D. in Applied Economics at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. I also hold an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering, a B.S. in Mathematics, and a B.A. in Economics, all from Stanford University. Prior to enrolling at Wharton, I spent two years working as a consultant in the financial services division at Oliver Wyman in New York. 

Link to my CV

Publications












Works-in-Progress

Other Publications / Writing


Hotter Temperaments: Prisons and Violence in a Warming World
Econofact, November 2021
 (with Nicholas J. Sanders)

Future Directions for Research on Financial Literacy and Financing Longevity: Perspectives from Professor Olivia S. Mitchell
The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 2019

Perspective Piece on “Organizing Old Age Pensions for India’s Unorganized Workers: A Case Study of a Sector-Driven Approach, by Narayana Muttur Ranganathan
The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 2019

Lost and Found: Claiming Behavior in Abandoned Retirement Accounts
Center for Financial Security Working Paper, October 2020
(with Corina Mommaerts)

Frictions in Saving and Claiming: An Analysis of Unclaimed Retirement Accounts
Center for Financial Security Working Paper, October 2019
  (with Corina Mommaerts)

Financing Longevity: The Economics of Pensions, Health, and Long-Term Care - Introduction to the Special Issue     
The Journal of the Economics of Ageing
Special Issue on Financing Longevity, October 2018
(with Karen Eggleston)

Research Roundup: What Does the Evidence Say about how to Fight the Opioid Epidemic?
Brookings Institute, December 2018
(with Jennifer Doleac and Molly Schnell)

Reverse Mortgages
Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging
(section: Social Security and Pension Systems), Springer, March 2019
(with J. Michael Collins and Junhao Liu)

Individual Retirement Arrangements
Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging
(section: Social Security and Pension Systems), Springer, March 2019
(with Lois Miller)

Assessing the Need for a Comprehensive Social Security Scheme for India’s Below Poverty Line Population
Institute for Financial Management and Research Working Paper, August 2012
(with Samik Adhikari, Shardul Oza, and Shahid Vaziralli)


Teaching

I co-developed and co-teach a course on Business Analytics (GenBus 306). This course is now required of all BBA students at the Wisconsin School of Business. All course materials are available through a portal available to registered students. 

The learning objectives of the course are for students to: (1) acquire “statistical literacy,” meaning that they can interpret statistics frequently used in current events, industry reports, and so on; (2) distinguish between descriptive and inferential statistics, and apply skills such as data summarization, hypothesis testing, and regression analysis, using Excel; (3) apply the core concepts of probability to decision-making under uncertainty, including an introduction to simulation; (4) synthesize their knowledge with quantitative business cases; and; (5) effectively communicate data analyses in written, visual, and oral formats.