Director, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research and School of Information
Margaret Levenstein is Director of ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Research Professor at the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research and at the School of Information, and Adjunct Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Since 1962, ICPSR has been promoting research transparency and replicability by archiving and disseminating data. Our archive includes more than 10,000 studies and we host over 500,000 unique visitors at our web site each year. ICPSR specializes in curating data to add value, maximize access, and ensure long-term preservation. We also act as a global leader in encouraging data stewardship.
Levenstein has taught economics at the University of Michigan since 1990. She is Co-Executive Director of the Michigan Federal Statistical Research Data Center and co-PI of the Michigan Center for the Demography of Aging, with responsibility for access to restricted data resources. She is the Associate Chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and past President of the Business History Conference. She is PI of CenHRS, a Sloan Foundation-funded project building an enhancement to the Health and Retirement Study based on linkages to administrative and survey data on HRS employers and co-workers, and PI of a Sloan Foundation-funded project developing community-normed researcher credentials for access to restricted data. She received a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of numerous studies on competition and collusion, the development of information systems, and using “organic” data to improve social and economic measurement. Her project using Tweets to predict unemployment is updated weekly at http://econprediction.eecs.umich.edu/study. You can see her discuss her research on the impact of the 1930s Great Depression on innovative firms in the Midwest at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Ms7s-tPM4.