Michael Keane is a Wm. Polk Carey Distinguished Professor at Carey Business School. He has previously held positions as the Nuffield Professor of Economics at Oxford, and as Professor of Economics at UNSW, Yale, NYU and Minnesota. He is considered a leading expert on choice modeling (the mathematical modeling of consumer choice behavior) and life-cycle modeling, and has published over 100 papers in top journals in economics and marketing.

Keane's 1996 Marketing Science paper with Tulin Erdem is considered a foundational contribution to the literature on consumer learning and brand equity, and his 1997 Journal of Political Economy paper with Kenneth Wolpin is considered a foundational contribution to the literature on human capital. His 1994 Econometrica paper on the GHK algorithm was an important early contribution to the literature on simulation estimation, which makes it feasible to implement discrete choice models with large numbers of alternatives (as is often the case in real world markets) and complex patterns of consumer heterogeneity.

Keane has made significant contributions to the modeling of consumer demand, including brand choice and brand equity. This includes work on how consumers choose in complex environments in which choice sets are large, alternatives are complex, or both. In labor economics he has developed rich life-cycle models that incorporate a complex array of choices, including education, labor supply, marriage and fertility. He has worked in a wide range of applied areas including health economics, the economics of education, child development, forecasting, industrial organization, international trade, and the economics of transition economies. And he has made important contributions to panel data econometrics and structural econometric methods.