He is co-founder of Ideas 42, a non-profit organization that uses behavioral science to help solve social problems, and J-PAL, the MIT Poverty Action Lab and has made extensive academic contributions through the National Bureau of Economic Research and has also worked in government at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

In May 2018, he moved from Harvard to the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, becoming the George C. Tiao Faculty Fellow.

[6] Born in a small farming village in Tamil Nadu, India, Mullainathan moved to the Los Angeles area in 1980.

[9] He has made substantial contributions to the field of behavioral economics as well as innovative additions to the literature on development topics, such as discrimination, corruption, and corporate governance.

[10] His 2013 "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function"[11] published in Science, compared farmers' performance on intelligence tests in the bleak and stressful days before harvest, to the period of abundance following the sale of produce.

[14] Controlling for other factors, Mullainathan and his co-authors found that applications with white sounding names attained 50% more callbacks.

Factors may enable CEOs to gain from luck, manipulating committees (the Skimming Model) and decreased sector competition.