Robert Willis is a Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan and Research Professor at the Population Studies Center.
Dr. Willis received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1971. Before coming to Michigan, Professor Willis held appointments at the University of Chicago, SUNY at Stony Brook, and Stanford University. Professor Willis is Director of the Health and Retirement Study, a large-scale nationally representative longitudinal survey of Americans over the age of 50. His research interests include labor economics, economic demography, economic development and the economics of aging.
He has done research relating to economic behavior over the entire lifecycle including theoretical and empirical research on fertility; marriage, divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing, education and earnings, intergenerational transfers and determinants of poverty among elderly widows. Recently, he has begun a new area of research dealing with the relationship between probabilistic thinking and savings and wealth accumulation and other aspects of cognition.