Richard Ely Distinguished Lecture Series

Annually, the Department of Economics invites a highly distinguished scholar to provide a series of lectures on some important development in economics. This series is named in honor of Richard Ely who was a Professor of Political Economy at Hopkins from 1881 to 1892. Ely was the most widely known economist in the United States around the turn of the 20th century and was instrumental in the early development of the American Economic Association. He is honored each year with a Distinguished Lecture at the AEA Meetings and we honor him here - his first academic home - with this Lecture Series.

2007/08 - Tim Besley: "The Economics of State Capacity"

Schedule

Timothy Besley is Kuwait Professor of Economics and Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he is also Director of the Suntory Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD). In September 2006, Professor Besley was appointed to be an external member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. He also serves as a research Fellow at the CEPR and the IFS, and is a member of the Institutions, Organizations and Growth Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Professor Besley was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School and Oxford University where he became a prize fellow of All Souls College. He taught subsequently at Princeton before being appointed Professor at the LSE in 1995. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, of the British Academy, and the European Economics Association. He is also a foreign honorary member of the American Economic Association and is president-elect of the European Economics Association. Professor Besley is a past co-editor of the American Economic Review, and the 2005 winner of the Yrjö Jahnsson Award of the European Economics Association granted every other year to an economist aged under 45 who has made a significant contribution to economics in Europe. His research, which mostly has a policy focus, is mainly in the areas of Development Economics, Public Economics and Political Economy.

2006/07 - Albert "Pete" Kyle: "From Rational Expectations to Market Microstructure"

Schedule

Professor Kyle's research focuses on theoretical market microstructure. His research involves mathematical modeling of informed trading in speculative markets, including topics such as insider trader, market manipulation, price volatility, the information content of market prices, and market liquidity. His current research also deals with concepts from industrial organization to model the valuation dynamics of growth stocks and value stocks by applying techniques used to value real options. His teaching interests include venture capital and private equity, corporate finance, option pricing, market microstructure, and asset pricing. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Davidson College and studying economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, Prof. Kyle received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, he was a professor at Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Duke University. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a board member of the American Finance Association. He served as a staff member of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms (Brady Commission) after the stock market crash of 1987 and is a currently a member of NASDAQ's economic advisory board.

2003/04 - Richard Blundell: "Understanding Consumer Behavior: Microeconometrics and Revealed Preference"

Richard Blundell is Leverhulme Research Professor at University College London and Research Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is a Fellow and Council Member of the Econometric Society, Fellow of the British Academy, and Foreign Honorary Member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Economics Association. Professor Blundell has been honored with the Yrjo Jahnsson Prize and the Econometric Society's Frisch Prize and has been on numerous editorial boards including Econometrica, Journal of Econometrics, and Review of Economic Studies. His contributions have spanned the fields of microeconometrics, savings and consumption, labor supply and taxation, consumer demand, innovation and market structure, household behaviour and public economics.

2002/03 - Philippe Mongin: "Impartiality, Utilitarian Ethics, and Collective Bayesianism"

Philippe Mongin is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and is attached to the Ecole Polytechnique, where he teaches. He has visited numerous foreign universities and research institutions of which the Université Catholique de Louvain and the London School of Economics are just two examples. Professor Mongin is on several editorial boards including Theory and Decision and Revue Economique and was general editor of Economics and Philosophy during 1995 to 2000. For his distinuished accomplishments, he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite in 1995. His research is concerned with the theories of rational choice and collective decision-making, normative economics, the philosophy of economics, and epistemic logic.

2001/02 - Blake LeBaron: "Agent-Based Models of Financial Markets"

Blake LeBaron is Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Intenational Economics and Finance at Brandeis University. Previously he was Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin and served as director of the Economics Program at The Santa Fe Institute. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the external faculty of The Santa Fe Institute, and was a Sloan Foundation Fellow. Professor LeBaron's research has concentrated on the issue of nonlinear behavior of financial and macroeconomic time series. He has been influential both in the statistical detection of nonlinearities and in describing their qualitative behavior. His current interests are in understanding the quantitative dynamics of interacting systems of adaptive agents and how these systems replicate observed real world phenomena.

2001/02 - Ariel Pakes: "Dynamic Analysis in Industrial Organization"

Ariel Pakes is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society as well as the recepient of the Society's Frisch Medal. He has served on several editorial boards including Econometrica, RAND Journal of Economics, and Journal of Econometrics. Professor Pakes has given distinguished lectures at the World Congress of the Econometric Society and the Society for Computational Economics. After performing seminal work on patents, Professor Pakes has been a pioneer in the estimation of demand and cost systems and their use in analyzing the equilibrium response to policy changes and in the development of a framework for conducting numerical analysis of dynamic oligopolies.

1999/00 - Adrian Pagan: "The State of Empirical Work in Macroeconomics"

Adrian Pagan is Professor of Economics at Australian National University and the University of New South Wales. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including Econometrica, Journal of Econometrics, and Journal of Applied Econometrics. He has been a visiting professor at many institutions, including as the Hinckley Professor at Johns Hopkins University and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. He also served on the Monetary Policy Board for the Reserve Bank of Australia. Professor Pagan is particularly noteworhty in that he has made important contributions both to econometric methods and to many applied areas including macroeconomics, finance, and international economics.

1998/99 - Ken Binmore: "Game Theory and the Social Contract"

Ken Binmore is recently retired from his post as Leverhulme Professor of Economics at University College London. Formerly he was Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan; prior to that he was Professor of Mathematics at the London School of Economics. He is the author of 11 books and over 70 published papers on evolutionary game theory, bargaining theory, experimental economics, political philosophy, mathematics, and statistics. Professor Binmore is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was recently awarded the title Commander of the British Empire in recognition of his role in designing the UK 3G Spectrum Auction.