[16] In 2004–05, Keane was the Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University and, subsequently, has been a regular visiting professor there.

[19] A 1996 paper with Tulin Erdem in Marketing Science presented what is now the main economic model of advertising and consumer learning.

[20] Erdem and Keane (among others) have argued that their framework can provide an economic explanation for the phenomenon known as brand equity, based on incomplete information and risk aversion.

[23] In a series of joint papers with Kenneth Wolpin, published between 1994 and 2010, Keane developed a major line of research on dynamic life-cycle models of career (i.e., school and work) choices.

Substantively, their seminal 1997 paper on "The Career Decisions on Young Men" presented the so-called "90 percent result"—i.e., that most of what matters for lifetime earnings has already happened by age 16.

This is now a very active area of research in economics, which has been pursued by both Keane and Wolpin and, quite notably, by the Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman,[26] among others.

This was the first paper to account for the very complex budget constraints created when people may participate in several government welfare programs simultaneously.

In recent years, Keane has argued persuasively that, due to human capital effects, labor supply elasticities are much larger than the previous consensus of the economics profession would suggest.

Recently, Keane gave a keynote lecture summarizing this work at the 2015 annual meeting of the Royal Economic Society.

The recursive importance sampling algorithm developed in Keane's 1994 Econometrica paper made it possible to estimate panel data discrete choice models with complex serial correlation patterns.

Keane's 1992 Journal of Business and Economic Statistics paper with David Runkle developed a new approach for estimating linear panel data models in cases where the available instruments are predetermined but not strictly exogenous.

[32] Keane is well known as a champion of the "structural econometrics" school, which emphasizes the important role of economic theory in empirical work.